When we look at a world map today, all the land is seen to be neatly divided into around 200 or so fixed blocks, known as “countries”. In the context of international relations and conflicts, we often hear about the irrevocability of borders, in popular culture we learn about stereotypes and festivals and languages and cuisines of these countries. In a way we are presented with a world that is always divided into countries through clear lines, and these borders are deeply connected to the history and identity of the people that live inside them, and fixed in an eternal, intrinsically natural, almost sacred way. Countries are seen as units of culture, tradition, behavioural traits and values.
If we look back even 40 years into the past, which is a very short period in human history, this irrevocable aspect of borders become questionable - suddenly there is a huge country called the USSR in the midst of Asia, there are two Germanies, Czechia and Slovakia have merged into one, and all those tiny Balkan countries have disappeared into Yugoslavia. If we keep going further back, we see more and more changes - before the 1940’s there were hardly any independent country in Africa or Asia, instead there were colonial empires. The many lines in Africa where exactly how a handful of European powers deemed it right to divide the continent among themselves. Those lines would become the basis of countries in Africa in the second half of the 20th century, along with some of the administrative divisions within them. Of course these lines not any more natural than any arbitrary line on a map, they have nothing to do with people, and everything to do with foreign powers that ruled over them. The same goes for the borders in West Asia, which were drawn up when the Ottoman Empire fell.
Even in countries that were not created through colonization by foreign forces, the present borders were drawn up following wars and treaties. Most borders in Europe have everything to do with kings and armies and almost nothing to do with the people who got defined by them. It was entirely possible that Provence in Southern France or Andalucia in Spain remained its own country and Portugal were part of Spain, or that Italy remained fragmented in dozens of different countries. But despite their fragile and artificial nature, somehow, once countries become a reality they become a strong marker of identity. These identities stick to people defined by those borders, the same people who had little or no say in choosing those borders in the first place. Emphasizing on borders to redefine identity often leads to sad yet hilarious results, like how Indians and Pakistanis insist on Hindi and Urdu being different languages, or how Croats, Serbs and Bosniacs speak effectively the same language but call it by separate names, or how the many languages o China simply become, Chinese.
Even if someone tried to redefine countries to represent people living in a geographical region as faithfully as possible, it’s an impossible task. Throughout history, people of different languages, cultures and religions have almost always cohabited the same large geographical spaces, living side by side. As a result, no matter where we try to draw borders, we would almost always be left with minorities, be that linguistic, religious or ethnic. The idea that a large part of land is exclusive to a certain group of people is a relatively new and a very dangerous one, and attempts to implement that have resulted in extreme bloodshed and horrendous levels of tragedy, as in the case of the partition of India, the Balkan civil wars, the Armenian genocide or the Holocaust. Even after these very violent episodes, these regions are still quite diverse and heterogeneous, their cultures and traditions are still not entirely shaped by those lines. Today that same toxic idea is continuing to cause pain across the world.
Assigning one’s cultural, ethnic or national identity through borders lead to absurdities. A Bengali person born before 1947, has been an Indian, a Pakistani and a Bangladeshi. These changes have certainly affected the laws they had to follow or their travel documents, but does it really change every aspect of their culture? Cultural, ethnic and religious identities continue to exist in spite of borders – people within one country could maintain myriads of distinct identities (like in countries like India or Pakistan or Papua New Guinea), whereas people separated by borders can share virtually the same culture (like US and Canada, or Uruguay or Argentina). Not to forget the many groups of people who have neither their nation state, nor are even confined in one country, like the Kurds or Balochis or Punjabis, or those who do not even have a province or region where they constitute numerical majorities, like the Roma people in Europe or the many indigenous people in the Americas and Australia. Such identities are shaped by language, religion, culture and shared histories, which may or may not always coincide. The identities of each of these communities, represented neither by a border nor a flag and sometimes not even by a map, are still no less real than those coming from more homogeneous and well defined countries like Korea or Iceland.
What makes it hard for many to notice this is that the dominant countries of today's world, especially in the West, do have somewhat homogeneous cultures within their borders, with at least a very significant majority of their people belonging to the same linguistic, ethnic, religious and cultural identities. In some countries like France or England this homogenity was not there to begin with but was achieved through decades of government policy. Countries like USA, Canada, Australia or Argentina were shaped by settler colonialism lead by specific imperial groups, and are also culturally rather homogeneous. As a result, people from these countries look elsewhere expecting to see the same culture within borders, and struggle to comprehend either the depth of diversity in South Asia or Sub Saharan Africa within a country, or the complex relationships that culture and identity have with borders in those regions.
If we look further back in time, beyond the period of extreme European colonization, we see a very different world with regards to borders. Borders used to be a lot less rigid, and were not seen as much a part of one’s identity as they are today. States and kingdoms, even empires had a weaker grip than present day countries. As a result. Borders kept changing regularly, frontier regions kept switching hands, and people moved through them with far more relative ease than today. In many cases, the borders were not clearly defined in the first place and even when they were, there were vast amount of unclaimed or loosely claimed lands where people lived relatively free from any big national or imperial government. In Central Asia and the Eurasian steppes, even a few centuries ago, many people lived in self administered city-states or small communities, occasionally paying tribute to a nearby empire, but maintaining their identity and culture still. Vast regions in Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas, simply didn’t have well defined frameworks of political divisions comparable to today’s borders. In many of those regions, communities were often nomadic or semi-nomadic, for whom borders didn’t really have the same connotation.
May be its time we rethink the idea of nation states. May be we start to take borders for what they really are, mutually recognized power sharing mechanisms between groups of poltical elites, not something that defines who we are, and definitely not the fundamental unit of culture, language, traditions or shared history. We should be very careful to use these borders to define others or ourselves.
