The civil war in Syria and the constant flux in the territory across Syria, Iraq and Turkey that is controlled by ISIS have gone on long enough to suggest that the “known” borders of those nations are destined for the dustbin of history. This new reality raises the question: what exactly is a nation?

That which a nation is geographically – the set of borders that defines its boundaries – is very often a product of compromises, conquests, territorial exploration and claim-staking, victories, defeats, purchases, sales and/or imposition by external forces. They may be the result of facts and migrations from centuries or millennia ago, and those facts and migrations may have long faded into history, with the existing borders their only legacy.

There are many places in the world where borders are drawn in conflict with organic ethnic and other distributions, and there’s an unfortunate tendency to want to preserve the status quo, no matter how illogical, rather than acknowledge that there should be a more “natural” arrangement of borders. It’s the case all over Africa, whose borders are the result of European colonialism. We saw it in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. It’s the case in Iraq, and Turkey, and other Middle Eastern nations. We even see it in the USA, with portions of some states looking to “secede” from the rest of the state due to political differences. The conflict in Ukraine between the eastern Russians and the western Ukrainians was subordinated to presumptions of Russian imperialism and land-grabbing. Separatist movements in places like Catalonia are resisted by those who presume that the existing arrangement is the correct one.

Correctness is a bedrock philosophy for some who look to impose their beliefs on the rest of us. There are people who believe that that only one past drawing of a map is correct, that those who owned or occupied lands at a certain time in history are the rightful owners of those lands, and that things should either be restored to conform to that map or that reparations be paid. Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg has called this “snapshot geography.” The criteria for correctness seem to be a combination of white knight mentality, guilt and run-with-the-pack political correctness (and here I’m excluding self-interest, which I address in the next paragraph). A general rule seems to be that those who are more different from the white Europeans are the most favored, and in the case where people of equal differentness are in contention for land, those who are deemed more oppressed are deemed more worthy of having some past-history borders redrawn in their favor or some reparations paid for lands “stolen” from them. Of course, the very concept of theft is nebulous when it comes to historical possession and ownership of land, with a wide range of legal systems (and lack thereof) being in effect at various points in history. If we truly want to go down that road, we’d first have to somehow establish rules by which we assess chain-of-custody and legitimacy of transfer going back to the very first owners of a parcel of land, then follow the history of that parcel through the various transfers in order to determine if there was one that we, by OUR rules, consider illegitimate. We’d also have to define “ownership” itself. Does putting the first footprints on a tract of land establish ownership? Does cultivation or construction? What about abandonment? It’s a non-trivial matter.

People who play this game fall into two sorts. There are those who seek benefit for themselves or for their group/faction/tribe, and there are those who insist on standing up for those who either cannot or will not stand up for themselves. We can understand the motivations of the former. Land is the one thing they aren’t making any more of (with a hat tip to Dubai’s and China’s island-making), and territory conveys legitimacy. Thus, the Palestinians and the Israelis argue over the West Bank, the Catalonians want independence from Spain, northern Californians want to form their own state and call it Jefferson, South Sudan separated from Sudan a few years ago, Yugoslavia broke up into six nations, American Indian tribes are have “reservations” that operate apart from US law, and so on. Some sources list over 150 current territorial disputes around the world. I’m not too concerned about the self-interested sorts here. They’re acting in what they believe are their best interests, as humans always have and always will.

The more irksome sort are those who operate from a premise of “social justice.” They set their own rules and pass their own judgments, insist that others conform to those rules and respect those judgments, and through these rules and judgments tell the world how it should be arranged, shaped and maintained. They’ll use words and phrases like “occupied” and “rightful owners,” often with little more than personal prejudice as the basis for the implied assertions. They’ll apply a standard of injustice, because there isn’t a sustainable legal basis for their assertions. Their demands for changes so that the world better conforms to their vision invariably cost them nothing, and the parties who are on the short end of their demanded transfers have to suffer what is legally theirs taken from them. Others’ opinions matter only insofar as they agree and bolster their own.

This is, of course, the endless conflict in the battle for liberty – that between those who want to leave everyone alone to pursue his or her self interests and those who would impose their worldview on everyone else, for “the greater good.”

My father once observed that people who are miserly tend to manifest their cheapness in everything they do, as if it’s something that’s so constantly in the fore of their thoughts that they can’t not be cheap. His was a wise observation, and I’ve witnessed this phenomenon time and again over the years. He added that they’re also quite happy to spend lavishly on themselves when they choose to, concentrating their cheapness on their interactions with others.

So it goes with people of a statist bent. They’re always looking for ways to impose their will on the rest of us. They see no problem that can’t be best addressed by governmental imposition of an order they deem correct and proper. We’ll also often witness “rules for thee but not for me” behavior, where they demand others act and think according to externally imposed mandates, but also flout those mandates when it comes to their own actions.

This relentlessness is what makes the fight for liberty so difficult. Statists don’t seem to take days off, or content themselves with achieving certain goals and successes, and retiring victorious from the field. Thus Thomas Jefferson’s observation that “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” What makes it even more difficult is that those who embrace liberty aren’t as relentless. We aren’t on the perpetual prowl for infringements the way that social justice warriors are forever on high alert for racism, sexism, micro-aggression and the like. The latter are validated by their unearthing of wrong-doing, while the rest of us are more interested in living our lives than in investing time and energy to beat down every minor transgression.

We can understand how those with power want to maintain and expand the borders of the lands under their control. We can understand that some who live within those borders, and some who feel ancestral ties to certain lands, want territory for themselves and “theirs” to control. We can understand how third parties might have opinions on who’s right and who’s wrong. We can even understand how some nations and organizations like the United Nations believe that things would be better if borders were either maintained a certain way or adjusted a certain way.

What’s hard to swallow are the assertions of some that certain lands “belong” to certain people because “justice.” They’re also ludicrous given how fluid national borders have been and how migratory populations have been over the span of history.

Think about that the next time someone complains that the Europeans stole lands from the natives here in North America. Think about that with regard to the recent history of the Balkan states, with the more recent history of Ukraine, with the Israel/Palestine issue, and with all the sub-saharan African nations and their civil wars. The cold reality is that national borders are decided by strength and power, and if outsiders intervene to change those borders, they themselves are guilty of applying strength and power to redraw borders to their own liking. There is no overarching authority or divine right that accredits the imposition of one man’s geographic snapshot on others.

• About the Author

About Peter Venetoklis

I am twice-retired, a former rocket engineer and a former small business owner. At the very least, it makes for interesting party conversation. I'm also a life-long libertarian, I engage in an expanse of entertainments, and I squabble for sport.

Nowadays, I spend a good bit of my time arguing politics and editing this website.

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