What Is a Border?

Manlio Graziano

• Publisher: Stanford Briefs
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781503606630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The fall of the Berlin Wall, symbol of the bipolar order that emerged after World War II, seemed to inaugurate an age of ever fewer borders. The liberalization and integration of markets, the creation of vast free-trade zones, the birth of a new political and monetary union in Europe—all seemed to point in that direction. Only thirty years later, the tendency appears to be quite the opposite. Talk of a wall with Mexico is only one sign among many that boundaries and borders are being revisited, expanding in number, and being reintroduced where they had virtually been abolished. Is this an out-of-step, deceptive last gasp of national sovereignty or the victory of the weight of history over the power of place? The fact that borders have made a comeback, warns Manlio Graziano, in his analysis of the dangerous fault lines that have opened in the contemporary world, does not mean that they will resolve any problems. His geopolitical history and analysis of the phenomenon draws our attention to the ground shifting under our feet in the present and allows us to speculate on what might happen in the future.

1

A SHORT HISTORY OF BORDERS

1 BORDERS IN LAW

Even though the political borders between states are first and foremost a legal question, international law does not help much with their clear conceptualization. Alison Kesby writes, “The question of how the border is conceived in international law, and how it shapes identity and peoples’ lives, remains largely unexplored in the international legal literature.”¹ In the end, this is rather obvious, as the purpose of law is to give a legal framework for realities already in place rather than to create new ones. In fact, the emergence of new realities is often seen as a challenge to law, and as such, it is contained, if not subject to prohibition.

International law essentially deals with the defense of the status quo—in the case of borders, the prevention or resolution of infringements of their inviolability. The first international legal organization, the Permanent Court of Arbitration, was founded in 1899 with this specific purpose. Article 2, section 4 of the UN Charter requires member states to “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” As we will see, there are many cases in which the political and military reality on the ground has in fact changed officially recognized borders. Whenever this happens, international law—and the UN in the first instance—simply refuses to recognize such changes, although it does recognize these changes de facto by taking every possible step to restore the status quo ante. In 2004, Kofi Annan proposed a plan for resolving the division of Cyprus, which, as secretary general of the United Nations, he could not recognize.

Other international and supranational organizations, such as the African Union, the Arab League, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, follow the same general rule. The European Union and NATO require, among other conditions for the accession of new members, resolution of any pending territorial disputes, although things are much less rigid in real life. Cyprus, for example, was allowed to join the European Union even though the problem of its division was not resolved. Another case, that of the Rockall rock (88 feet in diameter in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean), is still disputed by four countries (Iceland, United Kingdom, Denmark, and Ireland), where the last three are members of the European Union (pre-Brexit) and the first three of NATO.

International law, then, does not offer an effective conceptualization of borders or, most important, a better understanding of the contradictory role they are playing in our current historical moment of global shifts in power. To understand borders, we must turn to the evolution of their very idea and its practical applications, and we must consider their various stratifications, including those that are the most invisible and unmentionable.

2 NATIVISM AND HISTORY

A dog that barks at the mail carrier from behind the gate is responding to the same natural impulse that made its master install the gate in the first place. The proponents of nativism advance the following theory on borders, boundaries, and frontiers: humans instinctively mark, isolate, and defend their territory, just like certain other animal species. These actions represent an indispensable condition for the survival of the fittest.

This is not the place to pass judgment on what is a controversial theory. What is certain, however, is that, beginning with a socio-biological and evolutionary presupposition, it denies that the evolution of human species has differed from that of dogs over the millennia. And it obviously denies the historicity of borders, because enclosure, whatever its form, is supposed to be coeval with the human race. There is obviously no way to resolve the issue in philosophical terms. Nevertheless, recourse to the few scattered notions we have of the first human communities will provide much more detailed insight.

Living on limited resources found in nature, the primitive communities of hunter-gatherers were essentially nomadic. Temporary sedentism, however, could occur when the natural environment proved to be particularly generous. In such cases, ties to the territory took many different forms, from the absolute prohibition of access to members of other communities (sometimes imposed by the construction of physical barriers), to the sharing of resources with groups living in other territories, or even to the sharing of the land itself, with no clear limits between one community and another—what the American anthropologist Lewis Morgan called “communism in living.”²

When, around the tenth millennium BCE, humans began to domesticate nature through cultivation and livestock breeding, communities tended to become nonmigratory. A spectacular increase of wealth allowed the first division of labor with the emergence of writing, engineering (mainly irrigation works), architecture, and the earliest forms of government. The area initially affected by this revolution in production was the Fertile Crescent (that is, the valleys of the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Nile), where the first state formations were born (the Sumerian city-states), around the fourth millennium BCE.

With these formations arose the problems of the political demarcation between cities and of control over neighboring areas essential to their subsistence. The defense of city-states in some cases relied on solid physical structures (the famous Long Walls of Athens that stretched as far as the port of Piraeus); in some others, on natural protection provided by rivers and mountains; and in others, on large intermediate areas (buffer zones), sometimes open to use by other cities. In Greece, the territorial boundaries around city-states were often marked by memorial stones and religious shrines, and those who crossed them were required to make an offering to the local gods, a sort of customs duty before the term even existed. Borders had become a serious matter. However, it is reasonable to think that when Titus Livius made Romulus utter a death threat against “whoever else shall leap over my walls!”³ the author was thinking (more) of enemies in first-century Rome than of those in 753 BCE, the year when Rome was founded.

The relations among city-states were generally conflictual, even if peaceful coexistence and confederations were not uncommon. The conflicts concerned neighboring territories, and a defeated city would lose its right over them. The possibility of conquest or annexation was excluded as economically useless or even burdensome.

When there was a substantial growth in agricultural productivity, which contributed to a rise in both population and economic specialization, certain city-states inevitably became better structured and more ambitious. In some cases, they went as far as to annex other cities and create veritable empires.

The first empire in history appears to have been that of King Narmer, who unified Upper and Lower Egypt around the third millennium BCE. Some scholars say it was the Mesopotamian Empire of Akkad in the twenty-fourth century BCE. The New Kingdom, which represents the moment of the maximum expansion of Egypt’s influence, dates back to the fifteenth century. Around the same time in the Yellow River valley, the Shang Empire was born, later succeeded by the Zhou and, finally, the Qin Empire (221 BCE). The Maurya Empire that emerged in 325 BCE was one of the largest and most powerful that ever existed in India. The Persian Achaemenid Empire (550 BCE) was the largest in antiquity before the Roman Empire. The latter, finally, was defined as such between the late third and early second century BCE as a result of decisive victories over three other empires: the Carthaginian, Macedonian, and Seleucid.⁴

The boundaries of these empires depended more and more on the political and military capacity to secure them. The borders of the Roman Empire at the time of its greatest expansion (117 CE) were mostly physical boundaries: oceans to the north and west; deserts to the south and southeast; and to the east, the Euphrates, the Zagros Mountains, the Black Sea, the steppes, and the Caucasus. In the immense central European plain, devoid of real natural obstacles, the famous Limes Germanicus was built: 340 miles of roads, forts, towers, walls, and palisades erected between 74 CE and the mid–second century in order to protect the provinces of Upper Germany and Raetia,⁵ later extended by the Danube Limes, which was much longer and more difficult to control. The third famous physical boundary the Romans erected, Hadrian’s Wall, was a 73-mile barrier built between the Roman provinces of Britannia and Caledonia, redoubled by the Antonine Wall 100 miles farther north. Rather than being used as political boundaries, such constructions, including the Great Wall built in the Qin Empire, served more as defensive barriers, a basis for further expansion, and a platform for the control and regulation of the flow of goods and people.

The state borders with which we are familiar today have very different characteristics: they are measured, drawn on a map, marked on the ground, and have a legal significance generally recognized by all parties involved. It was not until 843 CE, according to W. Gordon East, that a boundary was delimited by treaty, when Charlemagne’s three grandsons divided their grandfather’s empire; however, “no clear demarcation on the ground was then made.” The borders we are accustomed to, affirms East, are “a relatively recent innovation,” that most historians date to 1648.⁶

3 THE INVENTION OF BORDERS

In 1648, at the Congress of Westphalia, the conceptual and legal foundations of statehood were laid. This was the beginning of the process that led to the emergence of the nation-state.

The decline of the feudal system had been the long gestation phase of this process. The feudal system was based on much more fluid relations between power and territory than in the first empires, because the vassal’s observance of hierarchical subordination to his lord was by far more important than control of any territory. The vassal was subject to several authorities, whose territories sometimes overlapped or were physically distant. For example, the count of Zollern owed allegiance to the king of Swabia, to the German emperor, and at the same time to the pope, who claimed universal authority over all secular rulers. In short, the political dominion of nobles and monarchs extended not to where there was a border, but as far as taxes were collected and as far as bonds of allegiance and military duties were respected. Obviously, the empire had boundaries; they were represented not by a line, a limes, but by a territorial entity called a marca (Eng. mark), which gave its lord, the marquis, considerable military autonomy, sometimes so much so that it was behind exceptional political fortunes. For example, Brandenburg, the Berlin region, was initially a mere northern mark of both the Saxon Kingdom and the Holy Roman Empire. Today, certain toponyms bear the trace of that role: in Italy, the Lombard borderland of the Marca Fermana, later the Marca Anconitana, gave its name to the region of Le Marche; the German Märkischer Kreis district owes its name to the powerful county of Mark in Westphalia, at the western border of the Holy Roman Empire. In Slavic languages, the word krajina (border or edge) can be found in the Croatian region of Krajina, the historic borderland between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, and in the Ukraine (Ukrajina), the southwestern border of the Russian Empire.

The decline of feudalism coincided with the rise of an urban economy based on trade and craftwork. Where cities were stronger, as in Italy, they defied the authority of the emperor and noblemen, alone or in coalition with other cities; where they were weaker, as in France, they relied on the authority of the king, who was just as eager to dampen the spirits of nobility who had become too independent. The outcome was apparently paradoxical: in territories where the bourgeoisie was weaker (France), unitary states were formed around the absolute monarchy, while in territories where it was stronger (Italy), state-regions were formed around the cities and the former were in perennial conflict. Political centralization subsequently contributed to the rise of the bourgeoisie, while fragmentation seriously hindered it, eventually undoing initial balances of power.

Expansionist temptations grew in tandem with increasing wealth and political, fiscal, and military centralization: European absolutist states challenged each other in the conquest of the world and on the continent. It was the gigantic conflict between the old feudal order and the new absolutist order (and their different territorial organizations) that was actually at stake in the Wars of Religion that ravaged Europe for over a century (1524–1648). The Peace of Augsburg (1555) and then that of Westphalia (1648) established a new political and territorial order based on the principle of cuius regio eius religio, which recognized the prince’s right to impose his religion on his subjects, that is, the right to exercise his supreme and exclusive authority (political, fiscal, judicial, and military) within a given geographical area, without the interference of other states.

From a geographical point of view, the first corollary of the principle of sovereignty was an urgent need to establish clear dividing lines among princely territories, which set off a race for borders aiming at extending them and, at the same time, homogenizing the peoples within them. The subjects of the same prince had to be able to recognize each other, understand each other, and obey the same distinctive characteristics and the same laws. In short, they had to become—even if the word only appeared much later—a nation. In 1697, by expanding the borders of his kingdom to the east, Louis XIV conquered German-speaking Alsace and made of its inhabitants a French population.

Territorial unification and its cultural homogenization represent the condition for the creation and development of a domestic capitalist market. Because capitalism demands constant growth in order to survive, the need to expand the market beyond national borders soon collided with the symmetrical need to defend the national market’s borders. This irresolvable contradiction brought every continental state, in the words of Philippe Moreau Defarges, to “regret not being an island, which does not have indisputable territorial limits that guarantee a theoretically absolute protection.”⁷

The nation-state is a political projection of the domestic market, and it reaches its full maturity at the time of industrial development. At this stage, the intensity of the competition among industrialized countries is such that it demands a potentially complete identification between the state and its subjects (now promoted to the rank of citizens), as an indispensable condition of the ability to mobilize all national resources for productive, consumer, and military ends. The nineteenth century saw the creation of the state as we know it, but it was also the period in which the concept of the state emerged as a culmination of the spiritual, geographic, political, and even biological evolution of humankind. According to the “inventor” of geopolitics, Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), the state is a living species, which therefore requires its own living space (Lebensraum); only those who are able to conquer such space will be successful in the ruthless struggle for political survival. It is no coincidence that, as Ernest Gellner puts it, “the most violent phase of nationalism is that which accompanies early industrialism, and the diffusion of industrialism.”⁸

From Napoleon to Yalta, nation-states fought almost continuously to extend their boundaries, dragging the rest of the world into their wars—and into the deadly illusion that the invention of the nation is the ticket to well-being.

4 THE INVENTION OF THE NATION

Contrary to appearances, the process described thus far is anything but linear. The sequence of social evolution established by Lewis Morgan—whereby the wild stage (hunting, fishing, and gathering) is followed by the stage of barbarism (farming and stock breeding) and then by that of civilization (commerce and industry)—is effective for expository purposes, but it does not exactly reflect reality. In reality, human social evolution is dominated by the law of uneven development: certain circumstances allow certain peoples and certain areas to accelerate in their development, while other areas and other peoples stagnate or regress. The circumstances can be historical or natural. Anthropologists have partly explained the different stages of development of Native Americans and Europeans at the time of their encounter at the end of the fifteenth century by the fact that nearly all domesticable mammals and nearly all cultivable cereals were located on the Eurasian continent, while in America there were only llamas and ...