Our outrage over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is due to our preference for democracy over autocracy, and to the danger of Russia pushing further westward into Europe. Perhaps most of all, we abhor the idea of one country violating the borders of another one. This, we feel, should not be allowed in the modern age.
Two concepts deserve attention here: “borders” and “another one.”
It was not until the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that much of Europe accepted geographically defined national borders [1]. Not that the agreed borders ended wars, but they did replace “spheres of influence,” ethnic enclaves, and imaginary lines between military outposts as indicators of who controlled what. As colonialism mostly ended in the 20th century, newly independent territories also defined themselves geographically. Much of the rest of the world followed suit, though China appears still to stick to the sphere of influence notion.
Novelist Ken Follett, a careful researcher, tells us Josef Stalin’s condition for joining the new United Nations was that Ukraine and Belarus be considered independent countries. As the latter two were Russia’s puppet states, this gave old Joe three votes in the UN. Now Vladimir Putin wants to eat his cake and have it too, by claiming Ukraine was never, after all, independent of Greater Russia - Ukraine having had the nerve actually to behave like an independent state.
For various reasons, the nation-ship of other regions, like Taiwan, South Sudan, or Palestine, remain ambiguous, their inhabitants achieving only observer status at the UN, rather than full membership. Yet defining a ‘nation' only in terms of UN recognition is fraught also; see Donald Westlake’s Don’t Ask [2].
Our anger over the Ukraine situation cannot be invalidated, but it needs to be contextualized: Not everyone accepts our Western idea of tidy geographies.
(Not that the practice is always so tidy. The Washington Post reports that “completion of the wall in the lower Rio Grande Valley would leave an area five times the size of Manhattan on the wrong side of the divide.”[3] And in fact the Mexico-Arizona border was largely unguarded until the 1990s – meaning that people wandered back and forth freely [4], as do nomadic tribes today, who wander from Tunisia to Algeria and back, sans border checks. To define a nation, must we also ask whether a border is defensible? Whether it is in fact defended? This suggests the level of enforcement of geographic borders has something to do with wealth disparities and political sentiment.)
And really, a lot of Westerners feel two ways about it. Our nations are defined by culture as well as by geography. It seems we defined modern nations by geography only because geography is easier to measure than culture [5]. This brings us to the issue of mass migration, which is perceived, it seems, as at least as dangerous as armed incursions, in terms of threats to the integrity of nations. (Perceived by whom, you may ask? It is key talking point for Republicans in the US’ 2024 election cycle, and to an extent by Democrats as well, and it’s a hot button in current European politics.)
No one minds a few immigrants. They adopt – or even better, enrich – the culture of the host nation. We welcome them. It’s only when immigration occurs in massive numbers that natives see a threat to an established way of life.
This fact has been known for a long, long time, and we may take the pre-WWII Middle East as a case in point. Christians, Muslims and Jews lived in proximity with occasional but minimal violent flare-ups. Operators of the wartime Zionist underground railroad abandoned many elderly Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, prioritizing young people of fighting age – knowing that the large influx of Jewish refugees would destabilize the region that is now Israel, and lead to armed conflict.
Culture and tradition dominated geography then, as a Jewish state’s existence, and its boundaries, were still only aspirational. The problem that now plagues Benjamin Netanyahu (well, one of them, anyway) applied at that time: The influential desire of religious Jews to return to Jerusalem. This would drive the refugees to reject Britain’s ridiculous offer (as if it were the Brits’ right to offer it!) to settle Jewish refugees in Uganda [6]. (The ridiculosity continues to this day, as UK deports immigrants to Rwanda.)
In a work of fiction [7], author Michael Chabon argued facetiously but convincingly that the Jewish state should have been established in sparsely settled Alaska, where the natives might have welcomed the kind of economic development Jews in fact created, under such existential stress, in Israel.
Global warming has begun to accelerate mass migration, and will do so even more in the future. What then of tidy geographies? Manage the nations, or manage the migrants (as UK tries to do)? Migration is an issue that stymies efforts at supra-national cooperation like the EU, arguments and stifling Brussels bureaucracies having led to the disastrous Brexit.
Our challenge, aside from tackling climate change itself, is to understand whether we define our nations in terms of geography, or in terms of culture, or through some combination of the two. Either would seem preferable to borders shifting with political winds, or a descent into pre-Westphalia chaos.
People must decide whether their way of life, which I have abbreviated as “culture,” is one that enriches their lives and the lives of others, or is one that is simply high-inertia, stagnant, and economically disadvantageous.
There is evidence that we can do these things, that attitudes can change. After all, my Jewish ancestors fled their village on the ever-shifting Ukraine-Polish border, due to Czarist anti-Semitic violence. Now, Ukraine has a democracy and a Jewish president [8].
[1] https://www.wcoesarpsg.org/the-evolution-of-borders-a-brief-history/
[2] Quercus, London, 2008. A farce concerning a poor country split into two poorer countries. They spat over which one may keep the existing UN seat and which must face the unaffordable expense of applying for a new one.
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/interactive/2024/border-wall-mexico-texas-land/
[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gatekeeper
[5] Donald Trump leverages this ambiguity, saying if he loses the election, Americans will “lose your borders.” He leaves the interpretation of that phrase to the voters. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/18/trump-doom-windows-cows-ban-harris/
[6] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-uganda-proposal-1903
[7] Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Harper; Reprint edition (January 24, 2012).
[8] And no, with no more than 2% of the population, Jews aren’t likely to “replace" anyone. No conspiracy comments please, they will be deleted.Comments
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