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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