What Is a Border? 9781503606630

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stanford briefs An Imprint of Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California English translation © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. What Is a Border? was originally published in Italian in 2017 under the title Frontiere © 2017, Il Mulino. Translated into English by Marina Korobko. Conclusion © 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Translated into English by Emily-Jane Cohen. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Graziano, Manlio, 1958– author. Title: What is a border? / Manlio Graziano. Other titles: Frontiere. English Description: Stanford, California : Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press, 2018. | “Originally published in Italian in 2017 under the title Frontiere.” | “Translated into English by Marina Korobko.” | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2017050480 (print) | LCCN 2017053019 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503606630 (electronic) | ISBN 9781503605398 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Boundaries—History. | Boundary disputes—History. | Geopolitics—History—20th century. | Geopolitics—History—21st century. Classification: LCC JC323 (ebook) | LCC JC323 G469713 2018 (print) | DDC 320.1/2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050480 Typeset by Classic Typography in 10/13 Adobe Garamond

CONTENTS

   Introduction: The Return of Borders 1 1   A

Short History of Borders 9

2   The

Power of Place 33

3   Borders

in Progress 57

   Conclusion 80 Notes 89

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INTRODUCTION: THE RETURN OF BORDERS

A glass is used for drinking. But it can also serve as a pencil holder or a paperweight. You can use it for catching a fly, you can throw it at the head of someone who annoys you, or you can break it and slit your wrists with one of its fragments. Every object has a primary function and a number of secondary functions. Political objects are no exception. They too have many functions, but with this important difference: their primary and secondary functions are not necessarily stable; they can change or trade places according to interests, circumstances, and opportunities. Borders are just one of many political objects: they are multidimensional and multifunctional in nature, and their political, legal, social, moral, and even psychological footprint changes in time and in space. Like other political objects, they are a tool for social interaction and the exercise of power, but in comparison to other political objects, they are intrinsically and ontologically ambivalent. They at once separate and bring individuals together; they divide territories where different legal, political, ideological, religious, sartorial, and dietary norms apply; and they also are the place where these various norms intersect and combine. They are, in short, zones in which conflict and contact alternate perpetually and, much more frequently, overlap. 1

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Naturally, borders are not just political objects. They are real, but they can also be symbolic. They can define properties or spaces intended for a specific use, such as factories, offices, classrooms, smoking areas, or rooms in an apartment. Sometimes they serve to exclude (the fence of a construction site), sometimes to include (the door of a shop), and sometimes to do both at once (the walls of a prison, depending on whether you are on the inside or outside). But it is in their political and geopolitical guise that their intrinsic, ontological, and multifold character is expressed to the fullest extent. To the question of whether borders remain today relevant, it is impossible to answer with a simple yes or no. In some parts of the world, they are definitely more topical than in others. Some borders are virtually ignored, while others are the subject of sharpeyed surveillance; still others are outfitted with new and higher walls, new and deeper ditches, and new and sharper barbed wire. Some are drawn from scratch. While until recently, the general trend was that they were dwindling and being absorbed into larger regional units, we are now seeing a reversal of this trend. Borders are being reevaluated; they are increasing in number and function, and they are even being reintroduced in areas where they had been virtually abolished. That said, the fact that they have once again become topical does not mean that they correspond to what we currently need. To consider borders from a dynamic point of view means first of all to consider them as a product of history. Borders have been a part of only the most recent and tiniest fraction of the long existence of Homo sapiens, and even during this short span of time, they have taken very different forms. They are coeval with the emergence of agriculture, writing, religion, and property, and they have changed in accordance with the political and social development of the human race. Their current form is even more recent: they were born just three and a half centuries ago, at the Peace of Westphalia, along with the principle of sovereignty. But even in

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the late nineteenth century, borders were more often mere lines drawn on maps than real barriers erected on the ground. They were a profound aspiration of nation-states, which at the height of their glory carved constitutions in stone proclaiming them “sacred and inviolable.” In these same years, however, they started to erode slowly but inexorably, the result of the “first wave of globalization” (1870–1913) and the emergence of “international law,” a slow-release poison inoculated into the veins of the sovereignty principle. This erosion was sharply accelerated by “the second wave of globalization,” which began in the late 1970s and has led to the crisis of the political form of the nation-state and its institutions, including borders. To consider borders from a dynamic point of view also means that they should be regarded as a means, not an end. Like any other political tool, they may have one meaning at one time and a different or even opposite meaning the next, depending on circumstances and interests. This is even the case when they disappear: the collapse of the Berlin Wall was hailed by a unanimous (and partly hypocritical) chorus of enthusiasts praising the beginning of the end of all walls and barriers separating individuals and peoples; yet eight months later, when Saddam Hussein boasted of having himself torn down a “wall”—the one that the British had invented between Iraq and Kuwait—a coalition of thirty-nine countries retorted with a firestorm unleashed under the aegis of the United States. Today, Russia, which has annexed the Crimea and has invented borders at will in Georgia, Moldova, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine, provokes indignation in one part of the world; Israel, which has annexed Jerusalem and the Golan and has doubled the length of the 1949 Armistice Line with its “security fence,” provokes indignation in another. And this will be the case until the next swapping of roles and indignation. Finally, to consider borders from a dynamic point of view means always to keep in mind that they are an institution of the state and do not have a life independent of the political life of the

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countries of which they are the outer bark. According to a widespread legalistic prejudice, it is institutions that make the state: whenever you have a constitution, a set of codes, an army, a parliament, a government, and a border, you have a state. In reality, the process of state creation happens in the opposite order. It begins with a struggle of various interests to define a common socalled national interest, around which various institutions are then built. Today, many countries in the world have the outward appearance of a state but are not states, or, rather, they are imperfect states, because individual interests in them prevail, permanently or occasionally, over the national interest, and their institutions—legal codes, military, parliament, government, and borders—are tools for internal struggles between factions and, at times, between individuals. Invariability of lines drawn on a map is not a sign of stability. The borders between African countries have lasted longer than those between European countries, yet Africa is the most politically unstable continent in the world. In sum, borders are both obsolete and actual: they are obsolete because market integration, migrations, intercontinental weapons, international law, and digital information have undermined the principle of sovereignty that borders used to guarantee; they are actual, because their weakening has coincided with a rupture of social equilibrium, with transformations in the balance of power and a reshuffling of territories and identities. The resulting disorientation is a worldwide but unevenly distributed phenomenon. In “developing” countries, the integration of markets has uprooted hundreds of millions of peasants from the countryside, pushing them onto the path of immigration, but it has also reduced by half the number of people living in extreme poverty; and by providing access to previously unknown goods and services, most notably health and education, it has increased quality of life and life expectancy. At the same time, the countries that before the great crisis of the mid-1970s had for centuries exclusively dominated world markets have lost numerous privileges due to competition

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with ever-increasing and ever more determined emerging powers, which has led to growing feelings of frustration and resentment. The more elusive this new reality has become for both “developing” and “developed” countries, the more urgent has been the need for a refuge. The return of religions to the public arena as the most immediately available, tried-and-tested way to keep a toehold was the first mass reaction on the planetary level; a yearning for borders followed shortly after. The huge success of Samuel Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations, published in 1996, shows how the end of the bipolar order dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union immediately ignited the longing for a “new order” that would be organized along demarcation lines at least as clear and precise as those of the Cold War.1 Huntington put forth a vision of a world as divided into different “civilizations,” each with a well-defined cultural identity and separated by clearly delineated borders that made clear who everyone was and where they stood. It matters little that such a clear and easily understandable world does not and can never exist. As Michel Foucher has written, “restoring the visibility of borders calms (a sometimes imagined) cultural anxiety in the face of the clamor and fury of the world.”2 Since the 2008 crisis, campaigns for the restoration of national sovereignty have grown in intensity and extent, and borders have become a physical site where newfound sovereignty becomes visible—a kind of epiphany of sovereignty. With the exodus of hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees to Europe in summer 2015 and the terrorist attacks in 2015 and 2016, these campaigns have become ubiquitous. They may have played a key role in Britain’s referendum on exiting the European Union and in the US elections in November 2016. According to many observers, the rekindling of national sovereignty proves that the nation-state is not in crisis, or at least, if it had been in crisis beforehand, it no longer is. Yet it is much more likely that the rekindling of national sovereignty is actually the

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most acute manifestation of this crisis, which blew up when it became clear that alternatives to the nation-state—the liberalization of markets, the creation of vast free-trade areas, the creation of customs unions and even political and monetary unions—did not offer the same guarantees of prosperity and security as did the old nation-states. The restoration of sovereignty—supplemented by the reaffirmation of national identity (whatever that is supposed to mean) and crowned by the rehabilitation of borders— thus appears to be the most obvious and most manageable solution, as if the prosperity and security of the old nation-states had depended on the impermeability of their borders or the purity of their national identity, rather than on the fact that these states had an almost exclusive monopoly over world markets. This monopoly has long gone, and it will never return. Isolationism and self-sufficiency are no longer possible because every type of production is tied by a thousand threads to the world market, and to cut one means to cut them all, rendering any kind of production impossible. Until June 23, 2016, it had still been possible to believe that the myth of a return to the past was an electoral gimmick aimed at garnering votes in the increasingly crowded pockets of anxiety, fear, and frustration of society, and the scrambling of those responsible for Brexit after the vote leads us to believe that they thought so as well. But Brexit, as well as the US elections of November 2016, are just the most disastrous manifestation of a trend of which there had already been numerous signs. In December 2015 came the failure of the Doha Round negotiations on the overall reduction of trade tariffs, which had been underway since 2001; the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), signed in October 2015, has not been ratified by any partner, and it was denounced by Donald Trump during his first week in office; the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), promoted by the United States but opposed by both presidential candidates in 2016, was declared “dead” at the end of August 2016 by

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senior German and French officials. On a broader level, according to the World Bank, seventeen of the G20 countries—the same G20 that after the crisis of 2008 had solemnly proclaimed they did not want to “repeat the historic mistake of protectionism”—have adopted numerous protectionist measures. According to the Global Trade Alert, between 2008 and 2016, the United States launched about 650 measures and India and Russia at least 550; between July 2015 and July 2016, Russia surpassed the United States, with 72 (versus 65) import restrictions, followed by the United Kingdom, India, and Italy. As for their effects, more than 300 measures have hit China’s export trade, but—and it could not be otherwise—between 200 and 250 have also affected the export trade of Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy. The mistake of protectionism is not only that of wanting to remedy the economic slowdown by slowing economic activity even further. The mistake is “historic,” because it repeats the pattern of the 1930s and its tragic, fatal consequences. Since the 1930s, world GDP has grown twenty-six-fold: today’s historic mistake could be at least twenty-six times more catastrophic.

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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 9

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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 N AT I V I S M A N D H I S TO RY

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 fron-

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tiers: 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 sociobiological 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.

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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

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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;

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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

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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

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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,

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“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 T H E I N V E N T I O N O F T H E N AT I O N

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 corn. When two (or more) peoples at different stages of development encounter each other, historical collision is inevitable, and the larger the gap is between them, the more violent the collision is. At the time of the Great Discoveries, the lower the level of development of the conquered areas, the larger was the scale of the massacres committed by the colonial powers. Law shortly came to the rescue of the civilized in their battle against the savages; Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel (1714–1767) suggested that any land not cultivated by indigenous peoples be considered terra

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nullius, no-man’s-land, and therefore available for appropriation by those who would put it to good use. The English were the first to take advantage of this legal instrument when they began to settle in Australia, beginning in 1788. As late as 1971, the first judge of the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory rejected the very idea of the right of the dispossessed Aboriginals to be compensated by the colonizers (“native title”), claiming that at the time, the land in Australia was “desert and uncultivated” because it was populated by “uncivilized inhabitants in a primitive state of society.”9 Although the gaps between peoples at different stages of development lessened considerably over time, they remain a decisive factor in social and political dynamics, especially as opportunities for interaction between them have become common. Many emerging international political actors have believed themselves able to reduce their historical lag with respect to the Great Powers by simply taking up the latter’s political forms, primarily the form of the nation-state. Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Greek, Turkish, Arab, Jewish, Indian, Egyptian, Croatian, and other nationalists tried to reproduce the success of Britain, France, the United States, and others by imitating not these countries’ process of development (which was beyond the realm of possibility) but the historical, legal, and institutional outcomes of this process. They thought they could build a house from the roof down. Thus, for example, Italy adopted the French Civil Code in 1865, and sixty years later, Turkey adopted not only the laws of France but also its institutional model and even its laïcité. All the parvenus of international politics have taken cultural homogenization to be a fundamental ingredient in the recipe for progress. Ernest Gellner defined the process of cultural homogenization as “the replacement of diversified, locality-tied low cultures by standardized, formalized and codified, literacy-carried high cultures.”10 When the process is spread over several centuries, this replacement occurs in a relatively peaceful way: in its gradual

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expansion, France turned Occitan, Catalan, Basque, Breton, Flemish, German, Italian, and French regions into French provinces. Within these provinces, the “standardized, formalized, literacycarried” culture—that of Paris—was gradually imposed, thus eradicating the “diversified, locality-tied low cultures.” In 1539, Francis I adopted the Francien (the dialect of Paris) as the official language of France, replacing Latin. Two and a half centuries later, with the revolutionary storm in full swing, the Abbé Grégoire, a Third Estate deputy, presented to the National Convention a Report on the Necessity and Means to Annihilate the Patois and to Universalize the Use of the French Language. According to Grégoire, linguistic homogenization was a way to “merge all citizens in the national mass” and “create a people.” A century later, one of the goals of the compulsory, secular, and free primary education of the Third Republic was to impose the use of French on a national level. In 1902, a ministerial decree forbade “the abusive use of Breton,” imposing repressive measures that would last several decades and would lead to the virtual disappearance of this language (in 2009, only 35,000 people spoke it as their first language). Linguistic assimilation is but one of the most striking aspects of the homogenization process. To express it as a play on words, the assimilationist model imposes the identity of identity and identity card: whatever your background, if you have a French identity card, you are French; if you have a Turkish identity card, you are Turkish even if you are born a Kurd. In the nineteenth and, especially, the twentieth century, the trend toward so-called national states became widespread and the time to homogenization reduced. Wherever the progressive (and relatively peaceful) “replacement of diversified low cultures” could not be implemented for lack of time, there were three compulsory methods of homogenization: forced assimilation, expulsion, and massacre. The American journalist John Reed, sent to the Balkans in 1915, described the entry of the Serbian and Greek armies in Macedonia:

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The Serbs gave the unhappy Macedonians twenty-four hours to renounce their nationality and proclaim themselves Serbs, and the Greeks did the same. Refusal meant murder or expulsion. . . . The Greek army entered villages where no one spoke their language. “What do you mean by speaking Bulgarian?” cried the officers. “This is Greece and you must speak Greek.” Refusal to do so meant death or flight.11

That same year, Turkish nationalists who had come to power in 1908 began to deport and systematically eliminate the Armenian population, with the purpose not only of suppressing a possible fifth Russian column but also of creating a homogeneous Turkish nation. The criterion for this forced nationalization was more religious than ethnic. In 1922, at the end of the “Turkish War of Independence,” the population exchange led to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Greek Muslims from Greece and of Turkish Christians from Turkey, whereas the Kurds—Sunni Muslims like Turks but belonging to the Iranian family—were automatically assimilated and became “Mountain Turks.”12 What happened around World War I is only the most notorious example of the general tendency to give birth to national entities that are characterized primarily, if not exclusively, by homogenization, whether ethnic or religious. The clearer it became that legal and institutional shortcuts were straining to make headway, the more the shortcut of ethnic or religious cleansing became the only resource within reach. What happened in Macedonia in 1915 was repeated in Poland in 1939, the Crimea in 1944, the Sudetenland in 1945, India in 1947, Palestine in 1948, Algeria in 1962, East Pakistan in 1971, the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995, Nagorno-Karabakh in 1993, Rwanda in 1994, and Iraq starting in 2003, to cite only some of the most infamous cases.13 The state of Kosovo was inaugurated with the expulsion of 250,000 Serbs, and the freshly proclaimed “Islamic State” immediately began to massacre, expel, or forcibly convert all those who were not Sunni Muslim Arabs: Christians, Yazidis, Shiites, and Kurds. The course of action of the alleged caliphate is not rooted in the history of Islam,

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in which cultural homogenization has been an exception, but rather in the history of nationalism, in which it has been a rule. 5 T H E N AT I O N A L I T Y P R I N C I P L E

In January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson made the nationality principle one of the key elements of his Fourteen Points for the reorganization of borders at the end of World War I. Wilson was certainly not the first politician to use this political tool to promote the interests of his own country. The Russians had done the same when they stirred up the Slavs in the Ottoman and Austrian empires, the French had done it with the Romanians and Italians, and the English with the Arabs and Jews in the Middle East (promising the same land to both, by the way). At first glance, the idea of tracing borders along the outer limits occupied by a given nationality seems to introduce an element of objectivity into a field dominated by lower instincts of political subjectivity, something akin to so-called natural borders. In reality, the nationality principle and the concept of natural borders do not represent any “objective” solution. The “natural border” on the Rhine, for example, was repeatedly claimed by France in order to annex 12,350 square miles of German territory (including the cities of Cologne, Bonn, Trier, and Mainz), whereas, according to the German Dietrich von Bülow, “A river valley forms a whole . . . [and] should either form a state apart or the integral part of a state. It should never be divided” (which obviously meant that the entire Rhine valley should have belonged to Germany, as had actually been the case between 1871 and 1918).14 In its anxiety for security, Russia has never been satisfied by natural borders but has always tried to seize a buffer zone beyond them. For example, the Russian conquest of the Caucasus mountain chain was followed by the conquest of Transcaucasia, and the capture of Bessarabia (now Moldova) at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains was completed only with the Russian de

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facto protectorate over Romania and Czechoslovakia, established in 1945 after several unsuccessful nineteenth-century attempts. In 1907, Lord Curzon recollected that borders “claimed by nations as natural on grounds of ambition, or expediency or more often sentiment . . . ha[ve] been responsible for many of the wars, and some of the most tragic vicissitudes in history.”15 The idea that political borders must coincide with cultural and linguistic ones has not produced better results. This principle was used as a fulcrum by German nationalism for claiming vast territories to the west and, especially, the east of Germany. When the Second Reich was proclaimed in 1871, many Germans were actually living outside its borders, not only in Austria and Switzerland but also in Poland, in the Baltic countries, on the Volga, in Transylvania, along the Danube, in Bessarabia, and so forth. The concept according to which German frontiers had to be extended as far as German was spoken was one of the triggers of the two world wars. Wilson’s proposal to trace the borders of postwar Italy along “clearly recognizable lines of nationality” was meaningless. At that time, only a small minority of people spoke Italian in the territory stretching from Sicily to the Trentino.16 The result was that South Tyrol, whose lines of nationality were clearly German, was annexed to Italy. The “punitive peace” scattered German-speaking populations among different states, and they found themselves not only in Italy but also in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Ukraine. A third of Hungarians, stripped of two-thirds of their territory, also found themselves dispersed in the five neighboring countries. World War II and its aftermath more clearly realized Wilson’s dream in Europe but at the price of the annihilation of the Jewish people, the forced displacement of entire populations— including at least 13 million Germans—and the denationalization of an unknown number of people, as in the case of Macedonian peasants in 1915. The only multinational state that officially survived, Yugoslavia, ended up following the general trend in the

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1990s with a long civil war that cost more than 100,000 lives and created 2.5 million refugees. Despite these historical precedents, the principle of nationality—that is, the separation of peoples—is still promoted as a unique recipe for peacekeeping. The belief that the creation of two ethnic states, Israel and Palestine, is the only solution to a centurylong conflict has become an article of faith that is not even worth discussing. The same principle was informally applied in Bosnia after the Serbian defeat in 1995, and it resulted in a forced separation and the rigidifying of the identity of three communities (Muslim, Serbian, and Croatian) in a province where, prior to 1991, nine of ten households had been mixed marriages. Some would like to apply the same principle in Iraq after the eradication of the so-called “Islamic State” by creating a Shiite province in the south, a Sunni one in the center-north, and a Kurdish one in the northeast. In Assad’s Syria, the civil war has created the conditions for the separation not only of Alawites and Sunnis, but also of Christians, Kurds, Shiites, Ismailis, Druze, Yazidis, Turkmen, and Assyrians. If each of these communities was to apply the nationality principle, the country would become a mishmash of refugees and a fragile patchwork of ministates in perpetual conflict, whether latent or open. Damascus would become a Belfast multiplied by ten, without mentioning what would happen in Africa if this same principle were to become the main criterion for a regional political reorganization. Furthermore, in most cases, the principle of national homogenization, once an economic imperative, has become anti-economic. In truth, it had already been anti-economic at certain stages of the nation-state formation process: the expulsion of nearly 300,000 Moriscos by King Philip III of Spain in the early seventeenth century led to a long economic recession, especially on the eastern coast of Spain, which, as some historians affirm, was not immaterial to the acceleration of the Spanish decline during this century. A similarly fatal blow in historical terms was dealt by Louis XIV,

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whose decision to revoke the Edict of Nantes in 1685 resulted in the departure of 200,000 Protestants belonging to France’s economic elite. Turkey, which eradicated Armenians and Greeks, or the Muslim countries that kicked out the Jews after 1948, all deprived themselves of precious energy, cutting off the limbs of their economic development. The same thing is happening in countries, again in the Middle East, that are currently persecuting Christian minorities, who are on average wealthier and better educated than the rest of the population. Just as in the time of Philip III and Louis XIV, short-term enrichment resulting from the confiscation of the possessions of the harassed populations is outweighed by the medium-term impoverishment that results from the loss of irreplaceable skills. The irony is that the nationality principle remains the undisputed legal and ideological horizon of world politics, and at a historical time that is seeing the decline of the nation-state and the spread of globalist doctrines on the “flattening” of the world (the alleged leveling of social, economic, and cultural gaps among different states and especially different nations), which claim that borders have become an unnecessary thing of the past. 6 A WORLD WITHOUT BORDERS

“I am necessarily a man, and only by chance am I French,” wrote Montesquieu in 1748, inaugurating modern cosmopolitan thinking. Cosmopolitanism—“a political-moral philosophy that posits people as citizens of the world rather than of a particular nationstate,” according to the Encyclopædia Britannica—is a politicalphilosophical universalist concept born in the Hellenistic period and rediscovered in the second half of the eighteenth century in the same period and in the same country (France) where the concept of the nation was being formed. The contradiction between cosmopolitanism and nation cannot be resolved by theoretical speculation because it is rooted in

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the very nature of the bourgeoisie that was celebrating its triumph in the eighteenth century. This bourgeoisie has always oscillated between cosmopolitanism and nationalism or, to put it in more contemporary terms, between globalism and sovereignism, or, in economic terms, between free trade and protectionism. The most recent example of this contradictory tension comes from the country with the freest trade in the world, the United States, whose government did not hesitate to shell out $12.8 trillion of public funds in 200917 alone (almost equal to the US GDP that year, about $14.5 trillion) in order to rescue the national economy from collapse during the subprime mortgage crisis. Aside from the distinction between sectors that produce mainly for the domestic market, which tend to be more protectionist, and sectors that produce mainly for the export market, which tend to be more free trade, it can be affirmed on the whole that the free market flourishes in times of expansion and prosperity, whereas protectionism is invoked in times of crisis. Enlightenment philosophers gave voice to a rampant, conquering, and optimistic bourgeoisie eager to sweep away any obstacles in its path, and that was therefore cosmopolitan. The nation that arose from the Revolution of 1789 was nothing more than the political form this bourgeoisie assumed, seeing itself as the vanguard of the “universal republic,” that is, as the first realization of a political system intended to become universal.18 Eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism was the first modern conceptualization of the old dream of universal human brotherhood. It was also the first formalization of the idea, whether or not conscious, that the requirements of the free movement of goods would eventually make borders superfluous. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, socialists and anarchists have challenged this idea, for both empirical reasons (since the bourgeoisie came to power, borders have multiplied and wars have been more bitterly fought) and theoretical reasons (competition between different bourgeoisies ineluctably leads to the multiplication of

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borders and embitterment of wars). Socialists and anarchists turned cosmopolitanism’s dream of universal brotherhood, which they saw as at best a chimeric moral yearning, into proletarian internationalism: the capitalist system had created a world class, the proletariat, that, unlike the bourgeoisie, had no national interests and could therefore give birth to a new universal society, with no classes, money, states, and, obviously, borders. In the decades following World War II, the optimism inspired by economic miracles and international political stability brought about a new burst of cosmopolitan ideals in Western Europe, if nowhere else. Entire generations of schoolchildren learned to draw groups of kids holding hands, wearing aprons with the colors of various flags of the world. A popular European television show in the 1970s, Games without Borders, was allegedly advocated by none other than Charles de Gaulle for the purpose of cementing the European project. The same year in which the show was broadcast for the first time, a group of doctors who had just returned from Biafra founded Doctors without Borders with the aim of providing assistance around the world in the case of conflicts and natural disasters. Dozens of other similar nongovernmental organizations were created on this model, and they all have cross-border solidarity at the heart of their action. Their spirit is Cicero’s motto, “patria est ubicumque est bene” 19 (the homeland is where there is good), which by no coincidence was quoted on the title page of Le Cosmopolite ou le Citoïen du Monde by Louis-Charles Fougeret de Monbron, published in 1750. Among the masses, the expectation of a society without classes or borders was confounded by the wreck of so-called “real socialism,” a geopolitical system Stalinism built on the debris of the October Revolution with the aim of restoring the grandeur of imperial Russia. Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its system of buffer states, there emerged optimistic new conceptions of humanity’s future. The first and most famous is the “end of history” theory, proposed by Francis Fukuyama in

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1992, according to which the triumph of liberal democracy marks the end point of humankind’s political evolution.20 It is interesting that in replying to one of the critiques of his theory, Fukuyama said in 2007 that his liberal democratic model was not the United States but the European Union, because “the EU’s attempt to transcend sovereignty . . . by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a ‘post-historical’ world than the Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.”21 In the atmosphere of the acute crisis in Iraq, the contrast between a malignant America and benign Europe seemed plausible; now, after a fissure in the “transnational rule of law” in Europe so as to curb the influx of refugees, and especially after Brexit, it seems much less plausible. Another optimistic theory that quickly became popular is that of the “flat world” proposed by Thomas Friedman in 2005, according to which the process of globalization tended to render historical, geographical, and cultural borders between states more and more irrelevant.22 Friedman’s critics call his idea, built on a very small sample of the market, at best wishful thinking. In fact, as economist Pankaj Ghemawat has written, “More than 90 percent of the fixed investment around the world is still domestic,” and the bulk of human communications does not exceed local circles.23 Friedman himself, while he stated that the flattening process is “the single most important trend in the world today,” nonetheless admitted that the trend is reversible in cases of “war, economic disruption, or politics” and acknowledged that “it is not historically inevitable that the rest of the world will become flat, [given that] hundreds of millions of people on this planet . . . have been left behind by the flattening process or feel overwhelmed by it.”24 Here we are again, back to the law of uneven development that shatters the cosmopolitan dream: the flattening process, if it exists, precariously concerns only some privileged areas, while the rest of the world, to quote Harm de Blij, is a “rough landscape.”25 The market tends to transcend national borders, but at the same time,

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it must defend itself from the intrusion of other markets. Some borders thus get flattened, while others get erected. The aporia lies not in logic but in the operating rules of our society. 7 THE RETURN OF BORDERS IN A P O S T- P R O T E C T I O N I S T W O R L D

Since November 9, 1989, the date of the opening of the first border crossing between the two parts of Berlin and at least until the dissolution of the Soviet Union two years later, it really seemed that history was moving in the direction called for by a famous graffiti painted on the wall: “No more wars, no more walls. A united world.” It was the fleeting triumph in popularity of the cosmopolitan dream tenaciously cherished for over two centuries. Margaret Thatcher, who certainly cannot be accused of a lack of realism, had asked Mikhail Gorbachev in September 1989 to prevent the destabilization of Eastern Europe under Moscow’s control. “We do not want a united Germany,” said the Iron Lady to the leader of the Kremlin, because “this would lead to a change to postwar borders, and . . . would undermine the stability of the whole international situation.”26 The British prime minister, and, with her, the Russian general secretary and the French president, François Mitterrand, knew perfectly well that the cornerstone of the international order established at the end of World War II was the division of Germany and Europe. The fact is that in the eighteen years following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, “the European continent and its Eurasian margins added about 16,600 miles of political borders”:27 1,750 miles in the former Yugoslavia, 1,500 in Central Europe and the Baltic countries, and 13,350 between Russia and the former Soviet republics, excluding the Baltic States. These numbers include only official borders that were internationally recognized in 2007. If we add the states created after that year (Kosovo), informal borders (inside Bosnia) or unrecognized borders (inside Moldova, Azerbaijan, Georgia,

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and Ukraine, to mention the best known), their number increases considerably. In sum, for every mile of dismantled borders (the Berlin Wall), 107 miles of new (official in 2007) borders have been built in Europe—a blow to those who still had faith in improving human destiny. The new international disorder, baptized on November 9, 1989, has led to more wars, more walls, and a more disunited world. It could not be otherwise. Ending the bipolar order, a sort of global joint venture of the United States and the Soviet Union, has the same impact as suddenly lifting off the lid of a pressure cooker: all that was boiling inside exploded. In the decades between the end of World War II and the fall of the Wall, the processes of economic and political development certainly had not stopped; in fact, they were what had ultimately led to the end of the order in question. Very often, however, they had been hindered in different ways in order to maintain the status quo (think of Eastern Europe); as soon as the lid was taken off, there was an explosion whose violence, we could say, was directly proportional to the pressure applied to those who had been subject to it. The tendency to create nation-states that had been triggered by capitalist development and politically consecrated by Woodrow Wilson, froze in many cases after World War II. Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Moldavians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Chechens, Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, and others had been caught up in the bipolar order, so that when this order collapsed, their nationalism exploded, propelled by all the energy that had accumulated over the decades. This did not happen in Europe alone. In the rest of the world, dozens of other nations had been deprived of a state: from the Kurds to the Palestinians, from the Punjabis to the Hyderabadi, from the Uighurs to the Tibetans, from the Tuareg to the Sahrawi, to cite only the best-known cases. And this is not to mention the Kashmiris, who since 1947 have been torn between India and Pakistan (a constant source of the strife between them, though both countries have rejected all of Kashmiris’ demands for independence) or black Africa, where the cage of the ethnic groups

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built by the previous world order (that of the colonial powers) has prevented the development of nation-states. In brief, in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it became clear that economic and political development was more uneven than ever before. “There will be soon nowhere in the world that has not been ‘contaminated’ by the industrial civilization that originated in Europe.”28 When Fernand Braudel wrote these words in 1963, the process of “contamination” had already entered its final stage. Deregulation and liberalization of the markets that followed the global crisis of the mid-1970s and, finally, the “taking off the lid” triggered by the end of the bipolar order have completed it. The world has become much more integrated, and even richer, but not necessarily “flatter”: the contact between those at very different stages of development has inevitably provoked more and more historic collisions. Between 1980 and 2007, trade (goods and services) increased from 42.1 percent of global GDP to 62.1 percent and foreign direct investment from 6.5 percent to 31.8 percent. Globalization has thus allowed a large fraction of the people on our planet to obtain a greater variety of goods at lower prices; it has allowed hundreds of millions of urbanized peasants to find better jobs and higher wages and to access a variety of previously unknown services, primarily with respect to health and education. According to the International Monetary Fund, the percentage of the populations of developing countries living in a state of “extreme poverty” (less than a dollar a day) during this time was reduced by half.29 The number of candidates wanting to take part in this cycle of new opportunities has been growing. The Croats and the Slovenes thought it more interesting to get rich in the German market rather than sink into poverty with that of the Yugoslavians. Their success has become a model for certain Catalan, Basque, Flemish, and Scottish (especially after Brexit) factions and even “Padanians,” all of them eager to erect new barriers in defense of their

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(relative) wealth. It is a model for all those peoples who took advantage, or would like to take advantage, of the great international disorder with the purpose of breaking old state unities where they were (or are) the recessive element: among these, the Eritreans, the Kosovars, the South Sudanese, Somalis from Somaliland and Puntland, South Yemenis, Abkhazians, South Ossetians, Uighurs, Tamils, but also Iraq’s Kurds, and Sunni Iraqis themselves, for whom the creation of an (Islamic) “state” is a lesser evil than the borders they inherited from the colonial past. Among peoples who have no hope of finding a better life in new or old states, massive migratory movements have touched off, and the wars of the new international disorder have increased their numbers with every year. At the same time, globalization has sharply accelerated a shift of the global geopolitical axis. China, which has become the secondlargest economy in only a few years, obviously wants to count for more politically than it did when it was only the ninth power (in 1976, the year of Mao Zedong’s death) or the seventh (at the end of the twentieth century). Along with China, some other “emerging” countries have continued to occupy market shares that previously had been the exclusive domain of the “developed” countries, as the Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore) had already begun to do, albeit on a smaller scale, in the second half of the 1970s. The populations of “developed” countries thus feel threatened on several fronts. Since the mid-1970s, their governments have been reducing public spending, absorbing immigrant labor at a lower cost, and relocating production, all in order to withstand the impact of competition from “emerging” countries. And their margins of international political maneuver are getting increasingly narrow. The results of globalization are ambivalent, but the balance, at least for part of these populations, appears negative. According to some sources, wages in the United States have remained the same as they were in the 1970s, despite the fact that

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labor productivity has more than doubled. What is even worse is that in 2016, the real median income of American households was 7.5 percent lower than the peak reached in 1999. The economist Robert J. Samuelson has calculated that “since 1950, the U.S. economy has grown slightly more than 3 percent annually. But projections for the future are just above 2%.” This reduction of one-third of America’s economic potential is, according to Samuelson, the “new economic norm [that] threatens to upend our political and social order.”30 And what is true for the United States, which recovered from the 2008 crisis better than many other countries, is even truer for other “developed” countries. “Globalisation has gone out of fashion,” said the Financial Times in April 2016, two months before the Brexit vote. “It has lost political legitimacy. And not only in the US: European populists of left and right share the Trumpian disposition to throw up the barricades.”31 The idea seems simple: if the opening of borders has brought us to where we are, the solution is to close them. For this reason, many in the “developed” world demand protection from the economic expansion of China and other “emerging” countries. At the same time, they know that any slowdown in the economic expansion of these countries would almost instantly become a serious threat to the economy of the entire world, and to “developed” countries first and foremost. In the post-protectionist world that now lives on market integration, protectionism and the closing of borders are the inescapable prelude to a generalized war.

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THE POWER OF PLACE

1 BORDERS ARE NOT THE SAME FOR EVERYBODY

War correspondent and writer Olivier Weber has described his stopover on the border between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, where the physical barrier, one of the most impenetrable border fences in the world, is reinforced by an even more impassable economic barrier: an eightfold gap in GDP per capita. Hundreds of thousands of Africans crowd the border ready to sacrifice all their possessions and even their lives in the hope of leaving behind misery, war, and persecution. Weber, about to enter the Spanish territory and experiencing no difficulty thanks to his European passport, thinks back to the migrants with whom he shared a few days of nomadic life in the nearby forest and imagines one of them “climbing the metal separation fence, a Berlin Wall for him, a limes separating him from his dream, and [he is] afraid to see him hurt himself on the sharp points and on the barbed wire; [he is] afraid to see him fall. Border dreamers often fall from a height. They touch the ground with a force of inertia multiplied by their hopes.”1 The Ceuta border is the critical point of what Harm de Blij calls “the power of place.” Although millions of people today can 33

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enjoy the benefits of the “flattening” of the world, the vast majority of the 7 billion inhabitants of planet Earth, writes De Blij, “will have worn the garb, spoken the language, professed the faith, shared the health conditions, absorbed the education, acquired the attitudes, and inherited the legacy that constitutes the power of place: the accumulated geography whose formative imprint still dominates the planet.”2 This geography does not necessarily take into consideration political borders: it is dramatic and tragic when two areas with highly uneven levels of development are in contact with each other, such as the Moroccan region of Tetouan and Ceuta, the United States and Mexico, or West Berlin and East Berlin before 1989. Within states themselves, such geography is generally invisible, existing primarily in the form of social barriers, but also as linguistic, cultural, and religious ones. Migrants must deal with two types of boundaries: the visible, official borders that separate states from each other and the invisible, albeit no less effective, borders that internally segment states, regions, cities, and neighborhoods. Invisible boundaries are by far more numerous than visible ones. According to the United Nations, in 2005 there were 191 million international migrants in the world (people who moved to a country different from the one in which they were born) and approximately 763 million internal migrants (those residing in their country of birth but in a different region), with a ratio of about 1:4.3 This seems logical, but it is not obvious, because those who find themselves in the spotlight are international migrants and not internal ones, whose experience is not necessarily less harsh. Another little-known and little-discussed point is that the number of international migrants from so-called developed countries is higher than the number of migrants from so-called developing countries. According to the UN figures again, in 2015, there were 140.5 million of the former and 103.2 million of the latter. The migration trend is increasing (from 2.9 percent of the world population in 1995, a figure that remained stable until 2005, and

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Ta bl e 1 Percentages of International Migrants in the Total World Population, 1990–2015 1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

2015

2.9

2.8

2.8

2.9

3.2

3.3

From “developed” countries

54.0

57.4

59.8

61.2

59.8

57.6

From “developing” countries

46.0

42.6

40.2

38.8

40.2

42.4

Total

source: Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations, “Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2015 Revision” (2016).

up to 3.3 percent in 2015) and closely follows the course of economic cycles: the more positive the cycle, the higher the proportion of migrants from the “flat world,” and vice versa (see Table 1). To complete the picture, we should add that almost all emigrants from “developed countries” moved to other “developed” countries, while almost half (43 percent in 2013) of the migrants from “developing” countries moved to other “developing” countries.4 In the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century, refugees made up a percentage varying between 7.5 and 8 percent of the total of international migrants, almost all of them from “developing” countries.5 Although the “refugee crisis” exploded in Europe and not elsewhere, nine out of ten refugees (17.6 million out of the world’s total of 19.6 million) in 2015 found shelter in another “developing” country.6 More than two-thirds (68 percent) moved to an African or Middle Eastern country and only 6 percent to Europe, which is half the number of the refugees to the American continent (12 percent). In the same year, the five countries with the greatest number of refugees were Turkey (2.5 million), Pakistan (1.6 million), Lebanon (1.1 million), Iran (979,400), Ethiopia (736,100), and Jordan (664,100). Hungary became the first European country to close its borders: it built a wall to halt the flow of refugees in 2015, when it accepted 2,693 of them, fewer than half

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of what it had in 2010, when the number of refugees on Magyar soil was 5,414, that is, 0.035 percent of all international refugees (in 2015, the proportion fell to 0.013%). Here again, the actual number of international refugees, that is, those forced to leave their country (21.3 million, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees) is only a small part of the total (65.3 million). In other words, two-thirds of them are “refugees at home.” Migrants and refugees from the “rough landscape” have a totally different experience with borders from that of the inhabitants of the “flat world.” In 2015, 956,456 refugees reached Europe by sea; 3,695 lost their lives in the crossing. In the first six and a half months of 2016, “only” 239,923 set out for Europe, but 2,933 died on the journey. In the increasingly arduous attempt to reach European borders, the mortality rate increased from about 0.4 percent to 1.2 in a single year.7 In the same period, Olivier Weber and millions of other people safely crossed these same borders by simply showing their passports, and sometimes not even that. Borders are not the same for everybody. 2 INVISIBLE BORDERS: REFUGEES AND IMMIGRANTS

As we have seen, three out of four migrants and two out of three refugees have not crossed national borders: they are migrants and refugees within the country in which they were born. Of course, this does not mean that they do not encounter equally impassable boundaries in their wanderings. For example, internally displaced people are often gathered in camps that physically separate them from the rest of their fellow citizens. And the treatment they receive is not necessarily better than the treatment accorded migrants and refugees from the outside. In the case of people displaced due to natural disasters, the suddenness of their movement creates pressure on a country’s infrastructure and the rest of its population, pressure likely to quash or even reverse gestures of solidarity with which the displaced have been initially accepted.

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Refugees produced by man-made disasters, in contrast, always remain someone’s enemies, and a threat looms over them wherever they move within their own country: the Rohingya people in Burma, the Fur in Sudan, 3 million Iraqis, and half of the Syrian population have all been forced to leave their homes without being willing or able to leave their country. They run the constant risk of being sucked into the vortex of war or persecution and, thus, of having their odyssey come to an even more tragic end. The situation of internal migrants differs considerably from country to country, region to region, city to city, and even neighborhood to neighborhood. Each of these differences is marked by a boundary that, however invisible, is no less real for all that. In the United States, these things occur frequently. According to the US Census Bureau, between 2014 and 2015, 36.3 million Americans changed their residence, with more than 5 million of them moving to another state and 1.6 million abroad. But the bulk of these relocations was concentrated in the urban areas of the East Coast, the West Coast, and the Great Lakes, while the Deep South seems more subject to stringent “power-of-place” laws. New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are, as Thomas Friedman would say, “flat” enclaves within a “rough” landscape. But we must not forget that within these three cities, there are “rough” neighborhoods, where, in the words of de Blij, “the overwhelming majority will die very near the cabin in which they were born.”8 In China, internal migration is governed by the system of hukous, a sort of internal passport that during the years of hard Maoist dirigisme regulated migration from the countryside to the cities. China’s urban population accounted for barely one-tenth of the country’s total population in 1949 and one-fifth at the end of the Cultural Revolution (1976), whereas since 2013, 50 percent of Chinese have lived in cities. The rural flight triggered by the rapid and intense development of the recent decades, with a peak of 1 million relocations per month at the beginning of the new century, has made hukou a factor in distinguishing among three broad

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categories of the urban workforce: locals; “privileged migrants,” who are holders of a hukou; and “non-hukou,” who are mostly illegal, have no access to social services, and are doomed to the “three-D jobs: dirty, difficult and dangerous.”9 Even where no regulations or legal constraints are imposed, there is an invisible boundary between local residents and recent migrants. Migrants from the rough world often live for shorter or longer periods of time in slums;10 they are often unemployed or underemployed; and if they do work, they are doomed to three-D jobs. In most cases, the rest of the population considers them a threat to social services and security, and altogether an unreliable foreign body. Remaining in the rough world, there is a rather tenacious legend according to which an internal migrant who speaks the same language and professes the same religion as his or her fellow citizens is treated better than an external migrant. In reality, the conditions of existence and the resistance both groups encounter are the same. The difference is one of time frame alone: the external migrant arrives later than the internal one. The more a country develops, the more it widens its geographic area of immigrant recruitment. Those who first expanded the population of the Italian city of Turin, for example, were farmers from the nearby suburbs, then migrants from the same region, then Venetians, then southern Italians, and, finally, immigrants from abroad: Africans, Albanians, Romanians, and Asians. These same stages have led to the same phenomena (with varying intensities, of course) around the world, with the exception of North America, where the waves of migration have essentially been international from the start (but where newcomers found themselves living in the same conditions as immigrants in the rest of the world). The boundary that separates migrants from the rest of a given population is perhaps the most important of the invisible borders determined by economic and class differences. Although the dividing line between peripheral slums and the rest of a city is not offi-

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cially drawn, it cannot be said to be invisible. Moreover, in cases of contiguity between social extremes, it may also give rise to the erection of physical barriers. The anthropologist Teresa Caldeira writes, for example, that the escalation of crime in Saõ Paulo since the 1980s has led to the implementation of “a series of new strategies of protection . . . of which the building of walls is the most emblematic.” She adds, “Both symbolically and materially, these strategies operate by marking differences, imposing partitions and distances, building walls, multiplying rules of avoidance and exclusion, and restricted movement.”11 As they become a stable part of the labor market, first- or secondgeneration immigrants begin to make use of social services and generally move into public housing, where they often come into troublesome contact with the lowest strata of the local workforce. These neighborhoods, often peripheral, are also located on the other side of a more or less invisible border. A 2011 survey revealed that in Clichy-sous-Bois, the epicenter of the 2005 French riots in the blighted Paris suburbs and only a bit more than 9 miles away from Notre Dame, 76 percent of minors had at least one parent born abroad (compared to 16.9 percent of the whole of the Ile-deFrance region, of which Clichy is part), and 22.7 percent of the population was unemployed (compared to 11 percent in Ile-deFrance).12 Paris is not Saõ Paulo; nevertheless, the périphérique, the highway loop that runs along the route of the old city walls, still represents a real boundary between two worlds that have little or nothing in common: one in Paris and the other in the suburbs. Not infrequently in the transitional phase from slums to public housing, immigrants live in certain neighborhoods of the city that may be central but are of less standing or left abandoned. In Turin in the 1970s, the 220 yards of the facade of the Porta Nuova train station constituted a line of demarcation separating two alien and incompatible territories: one, populated mainly by immigrants, was to the east of the station, while the other, elegant and wealthy, was to the west. In New York City, certain

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neighborhoods have seen a succession of immigrants of various origins: on the Lower East Side, the Germans who arrived in the 1840s were gradually replaced at the end of the century by Italians and Eastern European Jews, later by Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians up to the massive arrival in the 1960s of the Chinese, who extended Chinatown in the southern part of the neighborhood’s historic Little Italy site. In the United States, many communities have continued to live separately for decades, even though they arrived long ago. In addition to the case of Manhattan’s Chinatown, there are thirty-one major national enclaves in New York City today,13 and they are distinctly separated from each other. When you go from the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg to that of Greenpoint, for example, there is no crossing of any border, yet you come into an area where everyone speaks Polish, news agents sell Polish newspapers exclusively, grocery stores have only Polish food, and the churches are all Catholic, obviously Polish. The border is something immigrants bring with them. 3 RELIGIOUS BORDERS

For centuries, religious borders have been also political borders. For decades, ideological borders determined the world order. This is no longer the case. Today, our sense of security—the one that comes from assuming that we know where “we” stand and where “others” stand, which values are “ours” and which are those of “others”—is fading. Today, the market for dealers in certainties and boundaries is potentially infinite because its needs are constantly changing. Even at a time of sudden ideological fluctuations and identity shifts, such as the one we are currently experiencing, religion remains one of the most stable elements of what De Blij calls “accumulated geography”: almost always, people are Catholic, Muslim, or Hindu not because they have chosen to be but because they

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were born into a Catholic, Muslim, or Hindu family or in a Catholic, Muslim, or Hindu region. Religious mobility is still a very limited phenomenon, and it is essentially confined to the United States. According to a 2011 study, 37.5 percent of Americans have changed their religion at least once in their lifetime; in Germany, another country of religious pluralism, the 10 percent of the population that have abandoned their religious affiliations have not chosen any other.14 If the change from one religion to another were one of the characteristics of the “flat world” (although Friedman does not mention it), the “rough world” would extend even further than what is demonstrated by the investment figures offered by Pankaj Ghemawat. Religions, then, are deeply rooted in territory, though not necessarily because they emerged in a given territory. Actually, some of them (if we counting only the meager minority that have not been extinguished) have disappeared from the territory in which they were born: the best-known example is that of Buddhism, now hardly present in India, but it is also true of Judaism in Palestine before the end of the nineteenth century and of Christianity itself, whose presence has increasingly thinned in the same Near Eastern area in which it was born. Religions are deeply rooted in territory because they developed in close association with other forms of territorial development: political, economic, and cultural in the broader sense (not only knowledge and art, but also customs, food, clothes, and preexisting religions). When their territorial expansion was completed, mainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, religions identified themselves with territory in a “definitive” way. Obviously, less centralized religions became more intertwined with local cultures, up to the point of being confused with them. In an amusing novel published in India in 1951, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer describes the dialogue between two little girls, both from the state of Kerala but from two different villages (the final comment belongs to the mother of one of the girls):

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—What religion are you? —Muslim. —Yah Rabb-al-’Alamin! So you are Muslims, like us? —No, we are true Muslims! True Muslims! And her ears were not even pierced to wear halqats! She was wearing a sari, a short bodice instead of a shirt and a tiny dress under it. .... —They are no Muslims! You’ve seen her mother, haven’t you? The woman weaves flowers in her hair. Just imagine that! And have you seen the girl? She parts her hair in the middle and has two ponytails in front, on her shoulders.15

Conversely, the more that religions were centralized, the more they were concerned with distinguishing themselves from local cultures on which they were unable to impose their standardized culture. The extreme case is the censorship that Rome exercised between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries against the activities of its own Jesuit missionaries in China, whom their rival Dominicans and Franciscans accused of “Chinizing” Catholicism instead of Catholicizing China. Organized religions have a structured relationship with their territory and political order. Christianity was born as a state religion, and its theological structure (the Creed) was imposed in 325 by Emperor Constantine, at that time still pagan, in order to eliminate the political turmoil caused by “heresies.”16 This bond of dependence with power is still characteristic of the Eastern Orthodox Churches today. The emergence of new states in Greek Orthodox regions almost always went hand in hand with the emergence of new national Churches connected to political power: in Greece in 1833, Romania in 1872, Georgia in 1918, Serbia in 1920, and Albania in 1922. During the process of Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union in the 1990s, as many as four Ukrainian national Churches sprang up.17 In 2005, the govern-

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ment of the self-proclaimed Republic of Abkhazia acknowledged the creation of the Abkhaz Orthodox Church. Orthodox Christianity thus has a one-to-one relationship with territory. It does not proselytize outside its borders and ill tolerates the presence of other confessions on its national territory. Catholicism is a universal and territorial religion at once. The boundaries of Catholic ecclesiastical provinces and dioceses, and even parishes, are thoroughly traced and subjected to periodic revisions depending on their historical and political contingencies. Their map covers the entire world, including places where the Catholic presence is actually nil and no operational structure of the Church exists.18 Universalism was the trump card at the time of triumphant Christianity, when the papacy had laboriously managed to assert its supremacy over the emperor, but it became a weakness during the emergence of sovereign states, which cannot accept another authority on their own territory. These nation-states (such as Denmark, Sweden, and England) hence separated from Rome or sought to extend political control over the local Catholic Church (Gallicanism in France, Patronato Real in Spain, and Josephinism in Austria). Islam, wrote the Indian philosopher Muhammad Iqbal in 1934, is “non-territorial in character.”19 Like Catholicism, it has a universal vocation, but unlike Catholicism, it has no structure to defend and guarantee its nonterritoriality, nor does it have a leadership acknowledged by all the faithful that would empower it to interact with political authorities. Thus, in the course of its history, Islam has been almost constantly subjected to political authorities who have used it as a stepping-stone (if not the stepping-stone) to consolidate their legitimacy. Beginning in the 1970s, the tendency to nationalize—that is, to territorialize—Islam has become a common impulse of those Muslim countries or Muslim leaders who had little legitimacy, which explains the recent proliferation of republics, kingdoms, and Islamic states, most frequently in competition and conflict with one another.

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In two states, borders run exactly along religious fault lines: India and Israel. However, this is a paradoxical coincidence because Hinduism is the most territorial religion that has ever existed, whereas Judaism is the least. Four main features establish the identification of Hinduism with India: (1) there is almost no trace of Hinduism outside India; (2) Hinduism is the only feature that over two thousand ethnic groups of the federation have in common; (3) the principles of Hinduism were laid down by the Supreme Court in New Delhi in 1966; and (4) Hindu nationalism and fundamentalism coincide to such a degree that some ultranationalists advocate a religious homogenization of the country through the total subjugation of non-Hindus (remember that India is the third largest Muslimpopulated country in the world). Due to their absolute territoriality, Hindus do not proselytize among non-Indian populations and do not tolerate proselytizing of others.20 Contrary to Hindus, Jews are people without territorial roots. At its birth in the late nineteenth century, Jewish nationalism (Zionism) was considered at best a curiosity, with no certain location of the future “Jewish state” (Cyprus, Sinai, and Uganda were considered besides Palestine). Only 1.8 percent of the 2.5 million Jews who fled the Russian Empire between 1881 and 1914 following the great pogroms went to Palestine; others took refuge mainly in Germany and in the United States. Further settlement in Palestine was the result of a series of political decisions made by major powers (the United Kingdom, Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States in the first place) that culminated in the 1948 establishment of “a Jewish state in the Land of Israel . . . open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles.” According to UN figures, the birth of the new country was accompanied by the flight or expulsion of 726,000 Arabs; in relative terms, it was the most massive operation of ethnic-religious homogenization of all time (there were then 650,000 Jews in Palestine). With the “law of return” guaranteeing immediate citizenship to Jews

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around the world, the religious boundaries of the country were consolidated. They were extended after the 1967 war and subsequent unilateral annexations. Recently the Israeli government has discussed the possibility of decreeing by law “that the State of Israel was born and exists on the basis of the Torah and the Jewish tradition,” making the Talmud a complementary basis for the Israeli legal system.21 Compared to the historical territoriality of Hinduism, which is rooted in a few thousand years of the presence of its faithful in India, Judaism’s territoriality is recent and artificial, so much so that while the 15 million Jews in the world are often sympathetic to the decisions of Israeli governments, most reject it in practice by continuing to live outside the borders of the state of Israel. In the current phase of great international disorder, then, we are witnessing another contradictory movement: on the one hand, the emphasis on the territoriality of religions, or even their reterritorialization for reasons of political legitimization of governments and borders; on the other, the deterritorialization of religions, severed from their cultural origin by the whirling transformations of our era. Olivier Roy dubs this phenomenon “holy ignorance.” 4 H O LY I G N O R A N C E A N D T R A F F I C K E R S I N B O R D E R S

“The tectonic movements” caused by globalization, writes Olivier Roy, “blur territories and identities and sever the traditional links between religion and culture.”22 “Holy ignorance” is one product of these movements: it is a result of both the emigration of the faithful to foreign lands and the importation into their countries of standardized religious models that are alien to their culture, such as Wahhabism in Pakistan, Indonesia, or Senegal; Evangelicalism in Korea and Uganda; or Hasidism among the Sephardic Jews living in Paris. The faithful are offered ersatz religions reduced to their (alleged) lowest common denominator: the same simple aesthetic, dress, and moral codes for all, the intention being to

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make them feel at home everywhere. The result, however, is that the faithful who are mindful of cultural traditions no longer feel at home anywhere, and the faithful indoctrinated by the pills of formalism disguised as piety end up losing any notion of their original religion. “Holy ignorance” is a form of mass-produced religion that circulates like capital, goods, and people, and as Roy points out, in order to circulate, the religious object must appear universal, disconnected from specific culture that has to be understood in order for the message to be grasped.” After all, “salvation does not require people to know, but to believe.”23 The need to believe spreads at a rate directly proportional to the misunderstanding of the mechanisms regulating (and deregulating) our society, particularly in the current phase of acceleration of disorder. Ideologies such as “holy ignorance” help to satisfy this need because they offer simple, albeit illusory, solutions to complex problems and enable the avoidance all the difficulties associated with the long and strenuous process of learning and understanding. Ideologies, unlike religions, are ephemeral.24 Their life cycle lasts as long as does the problem for which they claim to offer a solution or an explanation, or else until the problem is resolved and explained in another way, at which point they end up unlamented in the dustbin of history. But even if their life is incomparably shorter than that of religions, ideologies may still take up a great part of individuals’ biological existence, all the while imposing themselves as reality. A person who was born, say, in the 1920s and died before 1989, probably lived his entire adult life believing that the world was really torn apart by a struggle between a “socialist camp” and a “capitalist camp” (many still believe it today). The example of the Cold War shows that although ideologies act as efficient tools of mobilization, they can also produce politically disastrous effects. Imprisoned by the ideological hysteria in which it got lost in 1947, the United States offered to Russia Mao’s

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China, Nasser’s Egypt, and Castro’s Cuba, despite all reasonable geopolitical considerations. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the ideological framework of the “two camps” suddenly became useless. With irrefutable political intuition, Samuel Huntington immediately proposed an alternative: future conflicts would no longer be carried along ideological fault lines, but along cultural ones or, rather, “along the fault lines between civilizations.”25 Arguing against the theory of the “end of history,” Huntington joined the debate of that time on the urgency of a “New International Order” in which the United States would keep its dominant position. He advocated a coalition between the old industrial powers (the United States, Europe, and Canada), alternately labeled “the West,” “Western civilization,” or “Western Christianity,” that would aim to resist the growing pressure of the “Sinic [Chinese] civilization” prone to ally itself, according to Huntington, with “Muslim civilization” and “Orthodox civilization.” The militant character of his theory becomes clear when we look at the maps of civilizations that accompany his text: the borders of “the West” are strikingly similar to NATO’s borders in 2016, and Turkey, the major difference, increasingly positions itself on the outskirts of the Atlantic Alliance, especially after the failed putsch of July 2016. Identity—or perceived identity at least, that is, what everyone assumes to be his or her own main distinguishable character—is currently in high demand. Boundaries of identity are much more porous today than they were in the past. The idea of enclosing them within a defined geographic area is very tempting to those who would like to find a semblance of order and stability in a world dominated by chaos and change. But this idea is a counterfeit fraught with politically disastrous effects, even more dangerous than those from the time of the Cold War. Or rather, it is a specific political project aimed at homogenization of territories on a global scale. For Indian ultranationalists, the representation of

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their country as a treasure chest of “Hindu civilization” (as on Huntington’s map) scores an ideological point in their favor, but if we switch from ideology to reality, what about the 172 million Muslims living in India? According to Huntington, the “clash of civilizations” was a possible evolution of international relations, one that had to be understood in order to be avoided, whereas for some of his hangers-on, it is already in place, a reality that necessitates all the instruments and features of war: ideological mobilization, recruitment, armament, combat, and final victory. The so-called “map of the caliphate” that the Islamic State’s supporters have put into circulation follows the same exact ideological outline: it aims to exploit the nostalgia for umma, the imaginary global community of Muslims, and it serves as an illustration of a recruitment notice. The project of a permanent and generalized civil war is clear and explicit. In February 2015, the Islamic State’s magazine Dabiq called for the disappearance of the “gray zone,” that is, the areas of coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims: “The world today is divided into two camps [a camp of Islam and a camp of kufr]. Bush spoke the truth when he said, ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.’ Meaning, either you are with the crusade or you are with Islam.”26 Here we are, once again, back to the theory of the “two camps.” As Friedrich Engels once wrote, “It really seems as though old Hegel, in the guise of the World Spirit, were directing history from the grave and, with the greatest conscientiousness, causing everything to be re-enacted twice over, once as grand tragedy and the second time as rotten farce.”27 5 INEFFECTIVE BORDERS

Sometimes ideology is more tangible than reality. That was the case with some of the major events of the Cold War, and it is the case today.

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Logic and arithmetic say that the refugees who arrived en masse in Europe in summer 2015 cannot possibly be a problem for the host countries. If Lebanon (4.5 million inhabitants) can withstand the impact of 1.6 million refugees and Turkey can embrace the same number, there is no reason why Poland, whose GDP is twothirds that of Turkey but more than nine times higher than that of Lebanon and whose population is eight and a half times higher, should go haywire over receiving 16,438 of them, that is, a hundred times fewer.28 Yet Poland is one of the countries that in 2015 took the lead in the “rejection front” against the European policy of quotas. The explanation for this paradox does not lie in facts but in ideology. When ideology gains the upper hand, it turns into a more than tangible reality: the refugees were herded like cattle in Idomeni or in one of the other hundred camps in Balkan Europe;29 the authority and authoritativeness of the European Union are weakening; and Poland, which has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, will soon find itself in full demographic crisis. Idiosyncrasy with respect to refugees, to Europe, to Mexicans, to Muslims, or to infidels (depending on the geographical coordinates of the idiosyncratic) is the product of disorientation in a world that is spinning too fast. Changes produce anxiety, and since there is no cure for this in reality, it is sought for in ideology. And the increase in demand causes an increase in the supply of easy promises. Today, the common feature of all the traffickers in easy promises is their passion for borders. The idea that building a wall can ward off alarming realities is a powerful tranquilizer appreciated by the masses; when these masses become a majority, as in the United Kingdom Brexit referendum on June 23, 2016, ideology turns into reality. History will tell us how disastrous this magical transformation may be, including for those who believed in it in the first place.30 The first threat that the borders are supposed to ward off is that of violence, but impermeability to external violence does not actually

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depend on border. On the contrary, sometimes it is the creation of new borders that unleashes violence, as happened in India in 1947 at the time of partition of the British Indian Empire into Pakistan and the Indian Union. Borders are nothing more than an appendage of the state, and their impermeability is relative; that is, it depends on the ratio between the resources available to the state that is willing to maintain its territorial integrity and the resources of the state (or of any other organized force) that is willing to violate it . The Maginot Line turned out to be ineffective under the impact of German power, while on the Italian front, the Alpine Line or Little Maginot Line held; it actually allowed the French to launch a counterattack. Much more recent, the war in Libya (2011), having crossed the borders of Niger and Algeria, has spilled over as far as Mali, which is not a neighboring state. In the Near East, the war in Syria directly involves Iraq and Lebanon, threatens Jordan, but spares Israel, which has the means (not only material) to protect its borders. Today, the form of violence that causes the most apprehension is terrorism. However, it is very likely that more rigid or numerous borders would not have helped to avoid some of the deadliest attacks in recent years. The hijackers in the September 11 attacks entered the United States on regular student visas; terrorists in London in 2005, in Paris in January 2015, and Orlando in 2016 were all citizens of the countries in which they committed their crimes. The perpetrators of the attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015, were mainly Belgians who moved through the borders with extraordinary facility using false passports that can be easily found on the market.31 Let us examine the violence of the “ordinary”: prepolitical and apolitical crime. Here too, the dissuasive power of borders is relative. Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen write, for example, that “a mere 5 to 10 percent of drugs trafficked across international borders is interdicted.”32 Tijuana (Mexico) is one of the most violent cities of the world; its border with San Diego is therefore one

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of the most guarded (but also one of the most crossed, with 40 million legal crossings per year). There are two fences, the first, about 10 feet high, is made of thick metal plates, and the second, 15 feet, has an upper part that is angled inward and covered with barbed wire; the no-man’s-land between the two walls is illuminated by powerful lights, monitored by control rooms, and constantly watched by the US Border Patrol. Despite all these precautions, the Border Patrol website itself says, “Tijuana launches gang members, drugs, and violence over the border with sheer ebullience.”33 Another factor contributing to permeability is what Olivier Weber calls the “hypocrisy of state borders.” In numerous countries, “many are the border guards that defend their own interests better than those of their country.” The more borders are sealed, at least officially, the more certain officials “become sensitive to bribes and trafficking.”34 During his long layovers at border crossing points all over the world, Weber spent entire evenings with guards and smugglers who met together after having confronted each other during the day, relying on each other’s expertise to increase the value of (illegal) goods transported across borders. For the migrants who put themselves into the hands of traffickers, this means that the more impenetrable the borders become, the greater chance they have of dying when they crossing them and the more they have to pay to be able to take that chance. Finally, there is a range of threats, real or perceived, that no border can ward off: natural or man-made disasters and diseases. Waves of migration are another: a sealed border may make the life of a single migrant more miserable, but it cannot eliminate a wave, which sooner or later will end up taking another route. Earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes are the least respectful of man-made borders. The December 2004 tsunami hit fourteen countries, some very distant from each other. To natural disasters must be added those that are human induced. The interesting thing here is how faith in the virtue of borders may at times give rise to bizarre declarations, such as that broadcast on French

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public television on April 30, 1986, that announced that the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl had been blocked by a high-pressure zone from the Azores on the country’s border. As for diseases, the risk of a pandemic is always present, in particular one of animal origin. A July 2016 UN Food and Agriculture Organization document warns against “transboundary animal diseases . . . that can spread extremely rapidly, irrespective of national borders.”35 But these infections can also serve as a pretext. In 1996, as Diener and Hagen recollect, an embargo on British beef following the mad cow crisis “offered a clear example where fear of an outbreak was used in conjunction with state borders to protect markets for local beef producers.”36 In short, borders fuel many of the fears of our time, and they are invoked ever more frequently without any consideration for their real effectiveness. They multiply at the same rate as disorder. Some of them, even if they have no legal existence, nonetheless determine the course of existence of millions of people. 6 PHANTOM BORDERS

There are at least eight phantom states in the world, that is, states not recognized by what is usually called the “international community.” Their populations, whether beneficiaries or victims of the situation, must accept their actual existence despite their legal inexistence. Bosnia-Herzegovina is a very particular case. The Dayton Agreement of November 1995, which put an end to the war, divided the country internally along a boundary that corresponded roughly to what had been the front line one month earlier: on one side, Muslim (Bosnian) and Catholic (Herzegovina) “entities,” and on the other, the “entity” with the Orthodox majority (Serbian). In this case, it is not the state that is phantom (Bosnia-Herzegovina is internationally recognized and represented at the UN) but its internal boundaries The 1 millimeter line traced in Dayton on a

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1:600,000 scale map became a strip 600 meters (656 yards) wide and 1080 kilometers (671 miles) long on the ground. Although subsequently reduced in width to 50 (55 yards) meters, the strip continues to be a sort of limbo for the approximately 15,000 people who live there: they do not know to what “entity” they belong to and, in the absence of official decisions, “pay taxes, obtain personal documents, and refer to the entity they agree about.”37 In contrast, the populations of phantom states have no possibility of choosing which entity to refer to. In general, phantom states are territorial units that arise from a conflict whose outcome is never formalized, mainly due to the absence of an agreement between major powers. Where the interests of the latter converge, a formalization of new borders becomes possible, as was the case in South Sudan in 2011. Kosovo, recognized by half of UN countries, is a kind of intermediate case. Russia, which is (obviously along with Serbia) the main opponent against the recognition of the independence of the former Serbian province, intends to use it as a bargaining chip for the issue of its new borders in Crimea, and it will almost certainly use it to confirm the acceptance, de facto if not de jure, of the status of other phantom states created by Moscow on the territory of some of the former republics of the Soviet Union. Half of today’s phantom states emerged from the crisis caused by the dissolution of the Soviet Union due to Russia’s desire to extend its influence in geopolitically vital areas or to prevent hostile powers from setting foot in them. Russia partially made up for the loss of Bessarabia (Moldova), an indispensable foothill base for its control of the eastern slopes of the Carpathians, by supporting the separatists of Transnistria (the Russian-majority region east of the Dniester River) and their self-proclaimed republic. The official Russian attitude is somewhat convoluted. With its military presence, Moscow guarantees but does not recognize Transnistria’s independence; at the same time, it demands that very recognition from the other phantom republics it has helped to create.

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These other republics are South Ossetia and Abkhazia (both officially part of Georgia) and Nagorno-Karabakh (officially part of Azerbaijan), to which we can add the so-called “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, which were carved out of the eastern Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine following the crisis of February 2014. The first two have been officially recognized by Russia (as well as by Nicaragua and Venezuela), which uses them to discourage the Georgian government from the desire to get closer to NATO. Nagorno-Karabakh is an Armenian-majority enclave inside Azerbaijan that proclaimed its independence during a conflict between the late 1980s and 1994 in which Russia acted with judicious ambiguity. It supported both sides during the war, and then it was an “honest broker” in a deal in which Armenia (a state the Russians traditionally trust more) had the upper hand, while avoiding, however, offering Azerbaijan over to Turkish influence. For Moscow, the ideal solution is to continue to influence the Transcaucasian policy from the outside, without risking any unwelcome interference. The “people’s republics” in eastern Ukraine have allowed Moscow to back the opponents of the Crimea annexation into a corner and reach the February 2015 agreement with France and Germany in Minsk. Officially, the aim of this agreement was a cease-fire between the Russian-speaking separatists and the Ukrainian army; in reality, from that moment on, the pressure on Moscow has eased up, and the fait accompli in Crimea has been “tolerated.” In a nutshell, Russia has used all these “states” as tools for the restoration of its imperial power. Of course, it is not the “rights of peoples” that motivate Russian activism: the way that the Kremlin has met demands for independence, or even greater autonomy, of other peoples of the North Caucasus—the Chechens especially, but also Daghestanis, the Ingush, Kabardians, and Balkars—is well known. Another phantom state is the Turkish Republic of Cyprus, which was established in 1974 when the military intervention of

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Ankara responded to Nicosia’s attempt to unite the island with Greece. This was the last chapter in the long and painful saga of mutual ethnic cleansing, with the division of the island and the expulsion of a third of Greeks and half of Turks from their homes. The Turkish “Republic” is recognized only by Ankara, but according to Michel Foucher, London tacitly supports it in order to “maintain its role as guarantor power as well as the status quo of its two large sovereign military bases . . . essential for its projection in the Near and Middle East.”38 In 2004, a plan for the reunification of the island was approved by the majority of Turks in the north but rejected by the majority of Greeks in the south. The Saharawi Republic was proclaimed in 1976 with Algeria’s support in response to the joint military occupation of the Western Sahara by Morocco and Mauritania in 1975, the year that the Spanish colonization came to an end. In 1980, Morocco began constructing a wall between the two-thirds of the country in the west and the remaining third in the east, which marks today’s de facto border between the area controlled by Rabat and the area controlled by the Western Sahara Liberation Front: an almost 1,700-mile barrier that swallows up half of the Moroccan annual defense budget, is guarded by 100,000 soldiers, and is littered with antipersonnel mines (about three per mile on average). Some consider it the longest wall in the world after that of the Chinese Great Wall. In this conflict by proxy between Morocco and Algeria, the majority of African countries support the “Saharawi cause,” whereas the majority of the Arab countries support the “Moroccan cause,” and the great powers seem to pursue an opportunist waitand-see policy (a de facto endorsement of the status quo). The last case is represented by two phantom states that emerged from the collapse of Somalia in 1991: Somaliland and Puntland. The first, created the same year on the former British Somaliland territory, considers itself independent, whereas the second, founded in 1998 in the northeastern regions of the former Italian Somalia, considers itself an autonomous state within a future

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Somali federation (nonexistent for now because of the civil war in the southern provinces and the cumbersome role played by Ethiopia and Kenya). Of the two eastern regions of the former British Somalia disputed between Somaliland and Puntland, one declared independence in 2007, thus creating the “state” of Maakhir, occupied by Somaliland in 2009 and by Puntland in 2016. And in the westernmost region of Somaliland, on the border with Djibouti, the “state” of Saylac and Lughaya was proclaimed in 2011, which later returned to control by Somaliland. . . . Phantom states with their phantom borders are a sign not of the vitality of the nation-state but of its crisis. Where an attempt to launch the process of creation of a nation-state had just germinated (as, for example, in Georgia or Somalia), centrifugal forces have regained the upper hand. The attempt of the “international community” to maintain the borders as they were inherited from World War II, in this second decade of the twenty-first century, has been subject to a series of stress that could result in the collapse of the entire system. In their proliferation, borders are the cracks that are opening in the wall.

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1 T H E A C C U M U L AT I O N A N D S U P E R I M P O S I T I O N O F EUROPEAN BORDERS

The crisis in the process of European integration has triggered a search for “true” European borders. As long as the process had the wind at its back, the problem did not exist. The enlargement of the European Union had been driven by circumstances and by relationship of forces, following, as Michel Foucher has written, the “North American (or Russian) mode, whereby a border marks a neighboring area to be integrated.”1 According to “parties, governments, commission, lobbies . . . Europe [was] destined to extend to the whole of the continent until it coincided with the area of the Council of Europe.”2 The French referendum that rejected the European Constitution in May 2005 can be considered the “official” beginning of the crisis. But the earliest signs go much further back, to France’s frustration at its loss of leadership in the integration process following German reunification and at its having been forced to accept, in 2004, an enlargement of the European Union that included eight new members from the traditional German area of influence in Eastern Europe in contrast to only two countries (Malta and Cyprus) 57

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from the Mediterranean. Public opinion was hastily taught lessons on the “true borders” of Europe, which admitted the “Europeanness” of Cyprus, remained open with regard to that of Ukraine or Georgia, but firmly ruled out Turkey’s. The component elements of European borders, both internal and external, are so numerous that almost any manipulation of them becomes possible. According to one of the fathers of geopolitics, British scholar Halford Mackinder, Europe is a product of geography—not so much for its favorable climate as for the density of its natural barriers, against which the long wave of Asian invaders has consistently broken.3 That said, the same geographical obstacles are at the origin of European political and economic fragmentation that has continued to the present. Not only is Europe the continent with the highest ratio of internal borders to total surface, but it is also the one producing the most recent borders. According to Foucher, 48.6 percent of European borders were traced after 1945 (and a quarter of these after 1990), while 47 percent of Asian, 60 percent of African, 62 percent of Latin American, and 98 percent of North American borders were the same in 1900 as they are today.4 Three salient features of European geography—the dense network of mountains and valleys, the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, and the North Great Plain—give a geopolitical meaning to the conflict between internal and external borders that is specific to the unification process in general and to the Schengen agreements (the progressive dismantling of the internal borders and simultaneous mutual strengthening external ones) in particular. Yet the Schengen Area, despite being a pillar of the European Union, does not map onto the Union’s borders:5 it includes only twenty-two European Union countries, and four of the Schengen members (Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Lichtenstein) are not in the European Union. In other words, the Schengen borders, amended seven times since 1995, differ from those of the European Union, which in turn differ from those of the Eurozone,6 which do not correspond to those of the forty-seven coun-

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tries of the European Council, not to mention the different borders of the European countries belonging to NATO. To this plurality of institutional borders we must add those, even more intricate, that result from historical accumulation. American researcher Robert Kaplan has identified five main legacies: a Mediterranean Europe, born of the trade and the conquests of the Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans; a Byzantine-Ottoman Europe, the longest lasting, with over fifteen hundred years of history; a Carolingian Europe, the wealthiest, through its control of major river basins; a Prussian Europe, born of the merging of the Margraviate of Brandenburg and lands historically Teutonic; and a Habsburg Europe, which developed around Vienna to compete with the Turks for the control over the Danube Valley.7 Each of these has had its history, core, expansion lines, and spheres of influence, all of which left traces that the short and bumpy adventure of the European Union has not been erased. Every country on the continent carries at least part of this baggage; some countries carry more than others. For example, Lombardy-Venetia was part of Carolingian and Habsburg Europe, but also of Mediterranean Europe; most of the tensions that affected and still affect the area can be traced to this triple and contradictory legacy. All this allows for the identification of some long-term trends underlying the composition of Europe today. Yet there is nothing fatalistic about them, and German history proves it. The merging (established at the 1815 Congress of Vienna) of Prussia—aristocratic, military, Protestant, tending toward the conquest of the East—and the Rhineland—bourgeois, mercantile, Catholic and profoundly steeped in its Carolingian soul—was the unlikely but nonetheless miraculous brew from which the German Empire arose fifty years later. As painful as it was, the definition of a national interest debunked the apparent incompatibility, transforming it into a complementarity. There is, however, a sixth Europe missing from Kaplan’s description, a Europe whose compatibility with the rest of the continent

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is more than doubtful, especially following the Brexit referendum of June 23, 2016. It is, of course, the Atlantic Europe, to which London affixed its seal after having excluded all continental competitors. Having lost its Atlantic dimension many decades ago and having opted out of the European Union, the United Kingdom is likely to find itself in a geopolitical no-man’s-land—unless, of course, and this is quite possible, another diplomatic stunt—for economic reasons as well as to maintain the balance of power— preserves its membership de facto but not de jure. In that way, there would be one more piece of the puzzle in the accumulation and superimposition of boundaries that today are the sign of a Europe in both progress and crisis. 2 T H E M I D D L E E A S T: T H E FA U LT O F S Y K E S A N D P I C OT A LO N E ?

In summer 2014, a group of ISIS militants took advantage of the conquest and destruction of a border post between Iraq and Syria to stage a propaganda video, The End of Sykes-Picot. In fact, according to the maps drawn by the Englishman Mark Sykes and the Frenchman François Georges-Picot on May 16, 1916, this area was supposed to be in the exclusive control of the French and no boundary was to have traversed it.8 The borders between Syria and Iraq as they appear in atlases today were drawn at the 1920 San Remo Conference, when the French had not yet managed to take possession of the territories assigned them and when Mosul (promised to France in the 1916 agreement) was under military occupation by London and claimed by Istanbul (it was incorporated into British Iraq only in 1926). Although the only guiding principle of Colonel Sykes and Ambassador Picot was the affirmation of their countries’ interests, their agreement made more geopolitical sense than the subsequent invention of French Syria and the two pro-British Hashemite kingdoms of Jordan and Iraq. Even if, in the previous Ottoman

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administrative division, Mosul and Aleppo had been at the head of different vilâyets (provinces), the links between these two cities were historically more intense than the links with the respective capitals (Damascus and Baghdad) imposed on them at San Remo. The ISIS militants, believing they were destroying the Sykes-Picot Agreement, actually restored it while unknowingly restoring a historical continuity that had been broken in 1920. If Latin American and African borders represent the archetype of artificial colonial borders, then Middle Eastern borders are their quintessence. The manner in which they were drawn can be described in the words of Sykes himself, summoned before the British cabinet on December 16, 1915: “I should like to retain for ourselves such country south of Haifa. … I should like to draw a line from the ‘e’ in Acre to the last ‘k’ in Kirkuk.”9 After they got rid of the Russians (who had had their revolution and published the Sykes-Picot Agreement) and Italians (who had reached a direct arrangement with Turkey), the British and the French divided up the Middle East in accordance with two specific goals: the maximum weakening of each other’s position and their shared aversion to the risk of an Arab alliance. In the first case, neither party would have hesitated to resort to Arab guerrillas; in the second, they would not have hesitated to become each other’s allies. Thomas Edward Lawrence, the legendary Lawrence of Arabia who in 1916 excited the pan-Arab nationalist ambitions against the Turks, had no doubt: “The Arabs, he wrote, are even less stable than the Turks. If properly handled they would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of small jealous principalities incapable of cohesion.”10 The borders that the British and the French drew in the Middle East and the chronic instability of the states within these borders throughout their entire existence are the result of the double objective (common to every colonial power in every part of the world and every legal form) of harming competitors and preventing the creation of a coalition of local, prenational, protonational,

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or, worse, national interest. Political entities invented for this occasion are commonly called “artificial states,” but this is a euphemism. They are undoubtedly artificial, but they are not proper states because they do not emerge from an endogenous process, from a struggle between local interests that culminate in the definition of a common, or “national,” interest; instead they are imposed by an external state administration determined to suppress any possible notion of a local coalition. Whether these territories had been colonies, protectorates, mandates, or overseas departments (as possessions of the metropolis), they were not destined to become states. The local ruling classes were selected not according to their ability to unify but according to their propensity, whether voluntary or not, to be divisive. To achieve this, the colonial powers exploited all possible rivalries: familial, tribal, ethnic, and religious. They did not even consider the risk that they were sowing the seeds of a future chronic instability because they were convinced that the colonial system would last forever and that the areas they dominated did not need a state because they were already part of a state: theirs. The colonial powers thus hindered the elaboration of a process of development that in some few cases and after centuries of struggle resulted in national homogenization. In recent years, some of the local and international players involved have presumed they could heal the colonial legacy by using a shortcut of forced and accelerated homogenization following the model imposed during World War I: local players practice it on the ground, and certain international actors theorize it from the outside in compliance with the Wilsonian principle of revision of borders along tribal, ethnic, and religious lines. They practice and theorize it not only in the cases of Iraq and Syria, but also, and especially, in the case of a “two-state” solution, repeated like a mantra for the final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Perhaps they forget that the same principle was already applied in India in 1947, with results that are well known.

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The absence of states that are the expression of a national interest is a factor that multiplies external influences and interference. Borders are the malleable and interchangeable pawns of these influences: the 1991 military intervention prevented Saddam Hussein from modifying the Iraqi border with Kuwait, but the 2003 intervention abolished de facto the border between Iran and Iraq. Israel has systematically violated all the borders recognized by the “international community” and is one of the few states since 1945 to unilaterally annex territories, yet no legal sanction has ever been imposed on it. The same “international community” tolerated the de facto annexation of Lebanon by Syria for almost thirty years (1976–2005) and today promotes the de facto secession of Iraqi Kurdistan. Saudi Arabia has built a 560-mile barrier along its border with Iraq, consisting of five lines of fences protected by a moat, seventy-eight control towers, radar, night vision cameras, eight command centers, and thirty-two rapid reaction centers. At the same time, the Saudis have been violating the border with Yemen (since March 2015), where they have an occupation force of 150,000 troops and 100 warplanes, according to CNN.11 The examples can go on forever. The fluidity of borders in the Middle East is directly proportional to their artificial character, while in Africa, where their artificial character is even more pronounced, they seem much more stable. Let us try to understand why. 3 THE “ORIGINAL SIN” OF MODERN AFRICA

Michel Foucher writes that African states “have essentially maintained” the commitment they made at the time of their independence to respect the borders inherited from the colonial past. This has led to a “long period of territorial stability” that spared Africa “the logic of fragmentation characteristic of the European continent after 1989.”12 Some information must be added to Foucher’s affirmation. Between 2015 and the first six months of 2016, six of fourteen

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ongoing wars in the world that have caused more than 1,000 victims each were carried out in Africa;13 88 percent of victims of all conflicts in the world between 1990 and 2007 are concentrated in Africa;14 and between 1960 and 2004, in sub-Saharan Africa, alone there were 227 coups, both attempted and successful (in the same period in Latin America, another continent notorious for coups, there were “only” 42).15 These data, although fragmentary, reveal the term “stability” to be inadequate to describe the political situation of the African continent. Foucher is right when he speaks of the substantial continuity of its borders, but the life of borders cannot be separated from that of states (or presumed states) of which they are one institution. Everything already said with regard to the artificial character of the political entities created in the Middle East in 1920 is even truer for Africa, although in the Middle East, before the arrival of European settlers, Persians, and especially Turks, had already set up political structures. These were in any case forms imposed by outside conquerors who were primarily acting in their own selfinterest, yet as George Friedman writes, “Turks, who lacked the manpower to work, or even manage, the territory they controlled,” granted great freedom to the “pre-existing local authorities … in managing their populations so long as they swore fealty to the empire … and paid a portion to the center and deferred to the Ottomans on defense and foreign policy.”16 This “world’s first truly multiethnic governing system” was applied in the Arab world less scrupulously than in the Christian Balkans, but at least it was applied. In sub-Saharan Africa, European colonizers found no preexisting modern political structures. Where they did exist, these kingdoms, empires, sultanates, and even caliphates echoed European or Asian forms of feudalism (even though some of these practiced slavery). Foucher himself acknowledged that the “pre-colonial political boundaries [served] more as separation marches than as modern linear borders.”17 Elsewhere, communities were essen-

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tially made up of hunter-gatherers with forms of organization similar to those encountered by European settlers on the American continent at the time of the Great Discoveries. In principle, it can be affirmed that when Europeans imposed their borders, they treated African territories as more or less terrae nullius, except when they had to reach an agreement among themselves. On such occasions, the separation lines were traced by joint committees and were in this case the result of regular negotiations and treaties. Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister at the time of the Scramble for Africa (1881–1914), recalled: “We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s feet have ever trod; we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.”18 The result was that only “in a sixth of cases, local ethnic configurations were taken into consideration at tracing”:19 177 ethnic groups were divided, and many other groups were forced into uneasy cohabitation. The most comprehensive work on this subject was written in 1959 by the American anthropologist George Peter Murdock. Of the 825 ethnicities that appear on his map, 229 of them with at least 10 percent of their historical homeland were partitioned by the colonizers into more than one contemporary state. Using the Murdock map, two scholars from the Centre for Economic Policy Research estimated that “conflict intensity is approximately 40% higher and conflict lasts on average 55% longer in the homelands of partitioned ethnicities.”20 And this happens in the wider context of “artificial states,” which, according to a study by the Center for Global Development, on average perform less well economically than “nonartificial states” and in which political instability and violence is more frequent.21 What remains to be understood is the extraordinary resilience of the borders drawn by the colonizers, especially in view of numerous chronic conflicts. The decision to respect these boundaries was

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made at the first meeting of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963 for obvious reasons: over two thousand ethnic groups and a large number of potential claims (Somalia, for example, claimed territories in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti) could have triggered a war of all against all on a continental scale. The Center for Global Development study integrates this explanation with the theory of “letterbox sovereignty,” conferred on whichever capital and whichever leader the letters of the UN, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank were addressed to, and more generally, the letters of the “international system” (primarily the former colonial powers), on whose generosity the existence of “new” countries depended. “The new rulers had no incentive to change a system of which they were the main beneficiaries, and the Organization of African Unity adopted a convention in the 1960s to treat colonial boundaries as sacrosanct (only rarely violated since).”22 Another reason is that, according to the UN Economic Commission for Africa, 43 percent of the continent’s GDP comes from “informal” cross-border trade. For example, Foucher writes, “The balance of public finances [of Togo, Benin, and Niger] depends on the porosity of Nigerian borders.” To this “informal” trade must be added more “formal” customs duties that, according to Foucher, represent between 30 and 70 percent of tax revenues in African countries.23 To modify these boundaries would mean killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Africa cannot and will not get rid of these borders, even though it knows they are a source of permanent instability. This accounts for the recurrent proposal of a continental union on the European model (in 2002, the OAU took the name “African Union”). But the road is long and bumpy. Despite the existence of fourteen regional economic groupings, inter-African trade represents only 9 percent of the total, compared with 74 percent of inter-European trade.24 And in any case, the question should be whether there exists the political will, for if the affirmation of one of the most

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celebrated African journalists is true, African leaders represent “a leader-dealer class, plundering public assets, and accomplices of an eagerly accepted re-colonization.”25 This complicity is in the nature of things: the lack of common national interest multiplies openings to outside influences. African and Middle Eastern “autocrats” all look alike because they are the final and inevitable product of the same “original sin.” 4 RUSSIA: OBSESSED BY BORDERS

“Geography, not history, had traditionally dominated the thinking of the Eurasian steppe,” writes James Billington in the first pages of his book on the history of Russian culture. Billington evokes “harsh seasonal cycles, a few, distant rivers, and sparse patterns of rainfall and soil fertility,” but also “the ebb and flow of nomadic conquerors [that] often seemed little more than the senseless movement of surface objects on an unchanging and unfriendly sea.”26 The only “natural borders” of the country—the tundra, taiga, and steppe—stretch from north to south, whereas from east to west and from west to east, no natural obstacle ever prevented the constant “ebb and flow” of conquerors, whether they were nomads from the Mongolian steppes or the German, French, or Polish from the central European plains. Two nearly simultaneous invasions of the Teutonic Knights to the northwest and of the Mongol Golden Horde (the “Tatar yoke”) to the southeast in the thirteenth century bequeathed a constant feeling of insecurity about the instability and permeability of borders. This “paranoid fear of invasion,” writes G. Patrick March, “would lead to a compulsion [of Russians] to expand over their neighbors, lest they themselves be expanded over.”27 The first essentially defensive expansion took place in the fifteenth century in the direction of the taiga forests and hostile tundra, both easily defendable. Subsequent expansions continued toward the Urals, the Caspian, and the Caucasus in the sixteenth

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century and to Ukraine, the Crimea, the Carpathians, Poland, and the Baltic Sea in the eighteenth century. This movement was completed in the following century with the final conquests in Siberia to the detriment of China (about a thousand miles of coastline between the mouth of the Amur and that of the Ussuri, in Vladivostok, opposite the island of Sakhalin), and especially with the conquest of Central Asia in the direction of the Indian Ocean, during what has gone down in history as the Great Game with the British raj in India. The Stalinist conquests of the midtwentieth century—de facto protectorates imposed on Central and Eastern Europe with US acquiescence—represented the perfecting of the “ideal” structure of the Russian Empire, although many experts have pointed out that there exist no “ideal” limits to its possible expansion. As Michel Foucher has shown, the border in Russian history has a “special status, close to the American concept of space open to conquest.”28 Each expansion allowed for the elimination of the most immediate threats and, at the same time, for the conquest of buffer territories to be interposed between the heart of the country and potential future threats: the move to the Urals, the Caspian, and the Caucasus, which followed the capture of Kazan in 1552, was made so as to conquer as much territory as possible between Moscow and the regions of Tatar origin. The conquest of the Baltic region (Estonia and Livonia in 1710) and part of Poland (between 1772 and 1795) had the dual purpose of taking territory away from direct rivals (Sweden and Poland) and turning it into a bulwark not only against a possible resurgence of these opponents, but also and particularly against new threats emerging in the West from France, Prussia, and Austria. The conquests in Europe by the Stalinist Soviet Union had this same motivation, even if the conquered countries were formally independent, and Stalin’s failed ambitions to go beyond the agreements with the Americans (in Berlin) prove Foucher’s claim that Russia sees every border as but a temporary way station on the road to further territory.

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It is only normal that in this essentially unlimited movement forward, defensive and offensive reasons became confused. Russia suffers from numerous natural handicaps: areas that are perennially frozen, deserts, nonnavigable rivers that are very far apart, enormous distances that cover eleven time zones, and, above all, lack of year-round access to navigable waters.29 The last is the fundamental structural weakness that prevents Russia from becoming a great power, capable of competing on equal terms with other great powers. The expansion to the Balkans and the Mediterranean, toward the Indian Ocean and the Yellow Sea, can be attributed to the aspiration to conquer one or more points of access to seas navigable year round, without which Russia, despite its 23,400 miles of coastline, is actually a landlocked country.30 The conquest of many non-Russian territories has often aroused the hostility of local populations. During the czarist empire, various strategies were adopted in order to limit the risks of revolt; during the Soviet Empire, the unscrupulous geographic engineering that constituted fifteen federated republics was added to these strategies. As in the best colonial traditions, their borders were drawn without regard for physical geography, but by taking into account the distribution of ethnic groups on the territory (the 1926 Soviet census recorded 176 of these), with the idea of separating them and throwing one or more sufficiently numerous and sufficiently dissatisfied ethnic minorities in the way of each ethnic majority, so that a possible revolt against Moscow could be turned into an interethnic conflict. For example, within the borders of Kyrgyzstan, along with Kyrgyz, there were Russian minorities, Hui (Chinese Muslims), and Germans (in the north), as well as notable Tajik and Uzbek minorities (15 percent of all Uzbeks, who are also found in Turkmenistan and on a massive scale in Tajikistan). Uzbekistan incorporated some territories with a Tajik majority, including the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara; the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, with an Armenian majority, was incorporated into Azerbaijan; and Khrushchev’s decision to “give away” the Crimea to Ukraine in

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1954 seems to have been dictated by the same logic, that is, the injection of a large dose of Russian minorities in order to transform possible insubordination of the restless Ukraine into a civil war. Once we understand the vital importance of the continued expansion of Russian borders, it becomes clear why Vladimir Putin stated in 2005 that “the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century” (although the 20th century was hardly lacking in geopolitical tragedies). It also becomes clear why, from the very moment of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, the goal of Russian leaders has been to reconstruct the empire in one form or another. The problem is not so much the loss of 2.1 million square miles of territory (exactly ten times the territory of France) as the fragmentation of the empire’s Slavic heartland into three separate states, the loss of all buffer territories in Europe, of the whole of Central Asia, and the overturning of the balance of power with China. The distance to the coveted Indian Ocean has increased from about 800 miles (around 300 if we also consider Afghanistan, Moscow’s long-time loyal ally) to more than 1,500, and the number of states that must be crossed in order to reach it rose from two (or one, if we exclude Afghanistan) to at least five. We have seen how Russia maintains constant pressure on some geopolitically strategic hot spots, such as the Caucasus, Transcaucasia, and Moldova, but also on the Baltic States, encircled by Russia, Belarus, and the exclave of Kaliningrad, all inhabited by large Russian minorities (over 25 percent in Estonia and Latvia, around 5 percent in Lithuania). And while the “warm” waters of the Indian Ocean have receded farther away (not to mention the access to the Yellow Sea in Manchuria, which Stalin had managed to open in 1945), the Mediterranean has moved relatively closer, and the route to the Mediterranean passes through the Black Sea. This explains why it is so important for Russia to keep full control of the Crimean peninsula (and to maintain a friendship with anyone who can guarantee its base in Tartus, Syria).

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Putin’s Russia did not hesitate to renew its historical vocation and ruthlessly move the borders in a world in which shifting borders remain at least formally a taboo. Obviously, Russia is not alone: Israel does it, as did Kosovo and the South Sudan (with US approval), and China wants to do it in the eponymous sea. The difference is that Russia does so with the impudence of firm belief in its own manifest destiny. It is the same “North American conception of the border area as open space” for the taking, but with more cynicism and less hypocrisy.31 5 CHINA BETWEEN LAND AND SEA

According to George Friedman, during the civil war from 1945 to 1949, Mao, who was “more of a geopolitician than an ideologue,” was preoccupied with taking full control of the buffer zones. “Interestingly,” writes Friedman, “his first moves were designed to block Soviet interests in these regions,” first in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia and then in Xinjiang, occupied by the Russians in 1934 and entrusted to a local proconsul.32 As for Tibet, Mao attended to it only after the war. “The rapid-fire consolidation of the buffer regions,” concludes Friedman, “gave Mao what all Chinese emperors sought, a China secure from invasion.”33 China is divided into two distinct parts: a Han core–Han are the majority ethnic group and make up over 90 percent of the country’s population–and the circle of non-Han regions (Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Manchuria) that surround it. In the nineteenth century, the West called these two parts “China Proper” and “Outer China,” a formula naturally rejected by the Chinese, who preferred to call the Han core the “Eighteen Provinces,” in accordance with the imperial administrative scheme. Today, geographers refer instead to the “15-inch Isohyet line,” that is, the line between the eastern regions averaging more than 15 inches of rain per year, which is considered the minimum amount

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necessary for an agricultural economy, and the western regions averaging less than 15 inches of rain. The area to the east of this imaginary line, crossed by three major rivers (the Yellow, Yangtze, and Jiang Xi), according to Friedman, contains a third of the world’s arable land per capita and is inhabited by 94 percent of the country’s population. The circle of non-Han regions thus forms a large buffer zone intended to keep away possible external threats to the Han core. The first obstacles are natural borders: the impassable hilly jungle on the border with Laos and Burma; the Himalayas—from Hkakabo Razi (19,295 feet on the border with Burma) to Pik Pobedy (24,406 feet, on the border with Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan), passing through Everest (29,029 feet, near the border with Nepal)—and the desert basins to the north—Tarim, Zungarie, and Gobi, with the latter two separated from the Altai chain. The geographical characteristics of the buffer regions buttress these barriers: the Tibetan plateau (1,550 miles long, with an average altitude of over 14,800 feet) and the deserts of Xinjian and Inner Mongolia. The extension of these regions (which account for 54 percent of the country’s land), the scarcity of population and resources, and the few decrepit transport routes add the final touch to these defensive bastions. There remain three critical points: the borders with Vietnam, Korea, and Russia in Manchuria. The last is more an issue for the Russians than for the Chinese, considering the distance from the Russian European heartland and the demographic imbalance between the two neighboring regions: 7 million on the Russian side as opposed to 70 million on that of the Chinese. On the border with North Korea, the construction of a highly controlled barrier is underway, officially to prevent infiltration by North Korean refugees but bearing in mind the nearly 30,000 US troops stationed in South Korea, the closest rival military presence to Chinese borders. The most exposed of China’s border is with Vietnam, but because there is (thus far) no military agreement between

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Hanoi and Washington, the ratio of military forces is too unbalanced to create a threat. Historically, the Han, sedentary and devoted to agriculture, had to fight nomadic tribes coming from the north and the west, until they managed to surround themselves by the cordon sanitaire of the non-Han regions. However, the crisis of the Qing Empire led to the loss of huge portions of territory, especially those ceded to the Russians (Turkestan up to Lake Balkhash, Mongolia, and the hinterland of Vladivostok) and the British (at the border with India, following the invasion of Tibet in 1903). But above all, it led to China’s substantial loss of coastal control when, beginning in 1842, all the major powers established their control over thirty-five port cities with a series of “unequal treaties” imposed on the country.34 The coast therefore became the weak link in the Chinese defense system. Aware of this weakness, the United States launched the Island Chain Strategy during the Korean War: the group of islands off the Chinese coast, from Hokkaido to Borneo, had to remain in the hands of American-friendly countries (Japan, Formosa, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia) and had to be reinforced by a second chain, then controlled by the United States, that was farther offshore (Iwo Jima, Guam, Marianas, and Caroline). In the era of the Maoist autarchy, this strategy did not essentially harm China, but when the country opened up to the international market, the Island Chain became a constant threat. The more trade increased, the more China’s geopolitical priority became the protection of maritime trade routes, the site of 90 percent of the country’s total volume of trade. Today, Beijing firmly intends to assert its maritime sovereignty, which is also military sovereignty, at the risk of provoking confrontation with its neighbors and especially with the big protector of its neighbors, the United States. In 2012, the government decided to adopt a new representation of its official map, vertical rather than horizontal, that, in addition to suppressing Japan,

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allows for a view of the nine-dash line in its entirety. The line formed by nine dashes was established in 1947 by the Chiang Kaishek government and adopted by Mao’s government as the maritime border in the South China Sea. It covers an area of more than 770,000 square miles that incorporates part of the territorial waters (according to the international conventions that China also signed in 1982) of Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei, plus a large area of international waters. According to Beijing, its “indisputable sovereignty” of these “historic waters” dates back two thousand years, thus preceding the 1982 treaties. To this dispute, which gave rise to numerous incidents with Vietnam and the Philippines in particular, can be added other maritime claims, such as the one over Senkaku-Diaoyu islands (1,700 acres total) in the East China Sea controlled by Japan, or the rock of Socotra, also claimed by South Korea, over which Beijing unilaterally declared an Air Defense Identification Zone in 2013. This front today represents the most fragile point of international political balance—most important, because Chinese strategic imperatives collide with the US strategic imperative to maintain control over the oceans; furthermore, because the three top economic powers, half of the global GDP, and $5.3 trillion a year’s worth of transiting goods are concentrated in this area;35 and finally, because China’s local rivals are directly or indirectly protected by the United States. The Clash of Civilizations, the famous book by Samuel Huntington, ends on an assumption that in 1996, the year the book came out, seemed like science fiction: a global war originally provoked by the conflict between China and Vietnam over the Spratly Islands (the most important “booty” within the nine-dash line).36 In order to avoid loss of credibility in the face of its regional allies—Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Australia—the United States, in Huntington’s scenario, runs to the aid of their Vietnamese almost-ally against China, which results in a chain of events similar to those that set off World War I. Today this scenario has become, in everyone’s view, a real possibility: the most dangerous border in the world is in the sea.

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6 THE LAST FRONTIER

We have seen that in 1900, 62 percent of Latin American and 98 percent of North American borders were the same as they are today. We must recall once again that the stability of borders has little to do with political stability. Since 1900, Latin America has gone through 114 coups, whereas the United States was involved in 2 world wars, a semi–world war (the Cold War), and about 30 other military interventions. The world’s first artificial borders are not those in Africa but those established by the Spanish in the territories they conquered in the Americas. The territorial distribution of the natives was obviously not a concern of the Spanish: the Maya were separated by several borders in Central America; the Quecha were divided among Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador; the Aymara among Peru, Bolivia, and Chile; and so on. However, the borders with another colonial power, Portugal, were defined in a treaty: the Madrid Agreement of 1750.37 At the moment of their independence, the new “states” followed the blueprint inherited from colonial rule, and there have been few substantial changes since then: the secession of Uruguay from Brazil in 1828; the division of Colombia into three parts in 1831 (Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela); the separation of Peru and Bolivia in 1839; the fragmentation of the United Provinces of Central America into five countries (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica) in 1840; and in 1903, the birth of the Republic of Panama, which was separated from Colombia at the instigation of the United States. The most enduring territorial dispute still underway is between Chile and Bolivia, born out of the 1879–1884 war in which Bolivia lost access to the sea.38 Latin America is slightly less unstable than Africa for two chief reasons: its ruling classes are, with a few rare and recent exceptions, descendants of the ancient colonial elites (they share this with the ruling classes of the United States and Canada), and, second, the potential imbalance caused by the inability to define a

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common, “national” interest has been often redressed by a binding external constraint: the “national interest” was imposed on these countries from the outside, with the “nation” in question being the United States and the “interest” being American. Whenever someone got out of line, Washington promptly reestablished the status quo ante through a coup or a military invasion. The territorial stability of the world’s first power is less surprising. According to Robert Kaplan, the United States has become “the political cockpit of the world” because it was spared the terrible destruction of the two world wars, the same way that Europe, according to Mackinder’s study, was in part spared the terrible destruction of the Asian invasions.39 This is only half true: the United States was spared the enormous destruction of the two world wars because it was already to a large extent “the political cockpit of the world.” Since 1898, it has been able to move its own real frontiers (which are quite different from its formal borders recognized by international law) in Asia and then in Europe. It is over these frontiers and on non-American territories that Washington has fought its wars for world supremacy. We have already seen that the American attitude toward the “frontier” has always been dynamic. Its asymmetrical power relations with its native population, but also the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, fueled the belief in an easy territorial expansion. When the war with England broke out in 1812, former President Thomas Jefferson boldly stated that the conquest of Canada was only “a matter of marching.” The conquest of the West made the country forget the setback of 1812 and eventually led to the theory of “manifest destiny” intended, according to the creator of the phrase, John O’Sullivan, “to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.”40 In an 1851 speech, the Unitarian minister Thomas Starr King added a theo-geographical twist to this theory: “God designs that each country should wear a peculiar ideal physiognomy, and He has set its geographical characteristics as a bony skeleton, and breathed into it a free life-spirit.”41 Between O’Sullivan’s and Starr

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King’s statements, there had been the annexation of Texas and the war against Mexico, which deprived the former Spanish colony of more than 55 percent of its territory (approximately the size of Europe). The victory against Mexico allowed the United States to consolidate its heartland, the great basin of the Mississippi, and the Gulf of Mexico. Once the Pacific coast had been added to this heartland and once national unity had been preserved thanks to the Civil War (1861–1865), the United States began a sweeping economic rise that obliged it to start “looking outward,” according to the strategy formulated by Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. As he wrote in 1890, the imminent opening of an isthmus between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans would require control over the Pacific up to at least “three thousand miles beginning in San Francisco” (as far as Hawaii) and over the “American Mediterranean” (the Caribbean).42 In fact, the United States had already started “looking outward” as early as in 1823, when President James Monroe warned the European powers against any temptation to return to the continent following the independence of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. When O’Sullivan evoked expansion of “the continent allotted by Providence,” it was still unclear which continent he meant. It became clear with time, so much so that in 1895, Secretary of State Richard Olney admitted, speaking of South America, that “the United States is practically sovereign on this continent.”43 The 1898 war against Spain implemented Mahan’s hypotheses: the Caribbean was brought under control, and the Pacific was invested with the American naval power that conquered Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines. Among the consequences of this bioceanic expansion, one was particularly important, predicted by Mahan himself: “It will not be easy as heretofore to stand aloof from international complications.” Less than twenty years later, the United States was at war in Europe, in contravention of the lesser known of the two postulates of the Monroe Doctrine, according to

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which Washington would refrain from intervention on that continent. The United States thus became the first tricontinental power in history, further consolidating and formalizing this position at the end of World War II. In its ascent, the United States established a true meta-frontier that had little or nothing to do with the Westphalian borders of nation-state sovereignty or with those recognized by international law or with those drawn by the colonial powers on continents distant from their own. Granting independence to the Philippines in 1946, the United States proved it could dominate the world even if it lacked colonial “legitimacy”; moreover, it fought this legitimacy tirelessly from Wilson’s Fourteen Points to Roosevelt’s “anti-imperialist” statements, with the obvious goal of replacing, or trying to replace, the old colonial powers. This meta-frontier marks the ultimate limit of a type of domination that is in the first place economic and only subsequently diplomatic and military, because only economic supremacy guarantees diplomatic and military successes. It is a meta-frontier that moves to the rhythm of competition: as other powers began to eat away at US economic hegemony, it began to lose its texture. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, European and Japanese capital gradually made its way into Latin America, causing the last great wave of coups d’état, which were quickly followed by the beginning of a new democratic political cycle. Economic pluralism is sooner or later followed by political pluralism, as the organizers of the 1773 Tea Party in Boston brilliantly intuited.44 The benefits that had showered the Americans due to their country’s almost exclusive hegemonic position on the world stage began to erode: it is the “new economic norm,” writes Robert Samuelson, “that threatens to upend our political and social order.”45 A practical expression of this threat is the shift of attention away from the imperial meta-frontier to the national border. There is a nostalgia for isolationism that has been growing for years and that Donald Trump represented with a more theatrical

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edge than his rival, Hillary Clinton. The Mexican “wall” is the solidification of the self-destructive mirage of “America First,” the blanket illusion of dominating the world while withdrawing from it. However, the first restrictive measures at the Mexican border, where more than 95 percent of illegal entries are concentrated, were decided on by the Clinton administration in 1993 and 1994: the number of rejected foreign applicants reached a peak in 2000, with 1.8 million. In 2006, the Bush administration began construction of a physical barrier, which was suspended in 2010 after 640 miles had been completed, on grounds of excessive costs ($2.8 million per mile).46 That same year, a national survey revealed that 68 percent of Americans were in favor of building a barrier along the border with Mexico,47 a figure that certainly stirred the electoral appetite of Donald Trump. But facts have once again followed a different course from ideology: the number of rejected foreigners went from about 1.2 million in 2005 to 724,000 in 2008 and 463,000 in 2010, the lowest level since 1972. The comparison of migration data between the two countries reveals that between 2009 and 2014, 1 million Mexicans left the United States and 870,000 entered, with a negative balance of 130,000 people.48 Due as well to the massive deportations under the Obama administration (from 360,000 in 2008 to 438,000 in 2013), the flow has been reversed. Their disconnection from the facts does not prevent obsessions and ideologies from increasing, and becoming reality at times. Those the New York Times calls “borderline lunatics” are more and more numerous, and they are riding the crest of a wave.49 Their compulsive rage for borders places them at the vanguard of a growing and widespread movement that demands isolation, protectionism, and autarchy at a time when isolation, protectionism, and autarchy are no longer possible—and not only in the United States.

C O N C LU S I O N

Now that “modern” borders have been defined, their inextricable link to the state requires explanation. The life of borders depends on the life of the state the way skin depends on the life of an entire organism: when an organism deteriorates, so does its skin. But while no dermatologist can disregard the organic relationship between the body’s vital functions and those of the skin, the ideological separation of elements in vital relationship to one another is almost the rule in the political sphere. When real connections (in this case, between the state and its borders) are dissolved, the resulting isolated elements are successively and arbitrarily reconnected in accordance with various interests. Most of the time, this is done to appeal to the electorate, and to that end, a link is recreated, even arbitrarily, such that it can meet the need for basic and immediate understanding. If British voters, for instance, have the impression that life in their country was better twenty years ago and if, twenty years ago, there were no Polish immigrants in their country, right away an aspiring candidate will be ready to furnish a custom-made link between this perceived worsening of conditions and the presence of Polish immigrants on UK soil. If we substitute British voters with Americans and Polish immigrants with Mexicans, the same situation obtains. And this is also true 80

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for voters and immigrants in other countries and other continents. From there, it’s but a short step to inferring that one’s perceived worsening conditions of life can be remedied by leveraging the inhibitory power of borders. But each proposed false solution to a real problem only ends up creating new problems. The real problem that in these last few years has opened the floodgates to the excessive passion for borders is the shifting of power, that is, the shifting of the economic—and thus ultimately—geopolitical axis of the world. Thinking that this problem can be resolved by strengthening borders is like thinking that one can lose weight by breaking the scale. Indeed, it’s much worse: breaking the scale at the most leads to a false good conscience and a few more pounds; coming up with false solutions to real political problems allows us to have a good conscience for only a bit longer because there will inevitably be new and more serious problems, setting off a dangerous downward spiral. The shift of power we are seeing today can be synthesized as follows. The handful of great powers that have dominated the world for the past four centuries is losing portions of its power to new players that have appeared on the economic scene. The decline is relative, of course: if world power were a cake, the slices affecting those players would be smaller. Now the cake of power is continuing to rise in terms of its absolute dimensions, which at least compensates a bit for the dwindling sizes of these slices. The rise of competitors, however, is an insoluble problem because it gives current or potential clients bigger freedom of choice and those more leeway to negotiate. A process has been triggered that will lead, barring greater catastrophes, to the loss of the old dominant powers’ preeminence and therefore, above all, the loss of some part of the benefits and privileges that derive from being dominant. There are two units of measurement for the shifting of power. The first is the dynamic comparison between the GNP of various international competitors: between 1990 and 2010, China’s

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gross national product grew more than fourteen times; that of Turkey more than five times; that of India and Brazil more than four; that of the United States two and a half; that of the United Kingdom and France a bit more than two; that of Germany, Italy, and Japan, less than two. There is (for now) no stagnation or decline, but it’s clear that the relative weight of things has radically shifted. This unit of measurement is, in analytic terms, the most important because it illustrates the general tendency. However, it is not what is responsible for the spreading frustration, recrimination, fear, irritation, and jealousy on the part of Western populations loudly calling for protective measures—for the sole reason that this measurement largely remains unknown to them. At the origin of these feelings is the second unit of measurement, which is dependent on the first (albeit in a nonmechanical way) and has a more concrete effect on the populations in question: the growth of the public debt. In 2016, the public debt of the United States represented 106.7 percent of the GNP; that is, it surpassed the entire annual product of the country by nearly 7 percent. As for the other “old” powers, “virtuous” Germany came in at 68 percent of its GNP; the British public debt was at 84 percent, just below France’s 90 percent, not to mention the Italian (127 percent) or Japanese (234 percent). By way of comparison, the Chinese public debt was 66 percent of its GNP, that of India was 41 percent, that of Turkey 35 percent, that of Indonesia 28 percent, and that of Brazil, despite eight consecutive quarters of recession and a convulsive ongoing political crisis, 73 percent. In other words, the “old” powers are largely living beyond their means, as if, out of inertia, they continue to spend what they could when they alone dominated the world and even though that era is gone forever. What’s worse is that a consistent part of their public debt is consumed by social spending, that is, by the welfare state. Just to compare, in 2016, France spent 31.5 percent of its GNP on social expenditures, while South Korea, the “oldest” among the “young” competitors, spent only 10.4 percent.

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For now, the anxieties caused by the fear of worsening living conditions on the part of the “old” powers are mostly psychological in nature. They result from the fact that society is not keeping the promise of continued improvement and progress that is the implicit basis of industrial capitalism’s “social contract.” As these countries gradually cut public spending in an attempt to stay competitive with newcomers, anxieties, fears, and discomfort are destined to increase, along with frustration, jealousy, and recriminations. For now, they cannot take it out on those truly responsible for this new state of affairs—-China, India, and Indonesia, for example, and the hundreds of millions of Chinese, Indians, and Indonesians who have emerged from poverty thanks to globalization. These recriminations, jealousies, and hatred are being channeled toward the most visible scapegoats: immigrants and foreign competition. Both of these cross borders. The obsessive fixation on borders is likely to increase rather than decrease problems. If there is a need for empirical proof, it has been provided by the United Kingdom. One year after the referendum vote of June 23, 2016, the British pound had lost 15 percent of its value with respect to the dollar (among the major currencies, only the Turkish lira had done worse, losing 19 percent), inflation had risen from 0.5 percent to 2.9 percent, real salaries had thus diminished, as had consumption, and in the first quarter of 2017, the country had registered the least growth of all of the G7 members (0.7 percent on an annual basis, in contrast to Italy’s 1.8 percent and Germany’s 2.7 percent). Moreover, the weakening of the British pound did not help exports, as classical theory would have it, because in a globally interconnected economy, exported products contain ever more imported raw materials and semifinished imports, which, with a weak currency, cost more. Furthermore, numerous banks and firms (Goldman Sachs, Barclay’s, Deutsche Bank, Lloyd’s of London, Microsoft, and easyJet, among others) had decided to move all or some of their activities outside the United Kingdom so as not to lose contact with the

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European Union; a third of manufacturers were considering moving their activities outside the country; and 47 percent of highly qualified workers hailing from rest of the EU, together with 36 percent of EU immigrants, were making plans to leave the country within five years. In short, one year after the referendum, which should have consolidated British identity, the country was facing an identity crisis without precedent, which became even more acute after the uncertain result of the elections anticipated for June 2017; the fact that the opposition was guided by an open supporter of the model of Venezuelan chavismo was another precise indicator of the level the crisis was attaining in the country. Considering that the United Kingdom still belonged to the European Union, the accumulation of effects provoked by the June 2016 referendum thus far demonstrates that compensating for the anxieties generated by the ongoing changes on a global scale by building new borders is an act psychologically comparable to committing suicide for fear of dying. Given the extremely low levels of demographic growth in the majority of European countries, the politics of closing borders to immigrants and refugees exhibits the same pathology, with the difference being that the suicide is a slow one in this case. Consider but one example. In 2015, Poland had welcomed 100 times fewer refugees than could be found in Lebanon at the time. And yet Poland, whose GNP was nine times that of Lebanon and whose population was eight and a half times greater, was one of the countries that in 2015 had taken the lead of the anti-refugee front against the European quota system, despite the fact that its fertility rate was one of the lowest in the world (1.3 children per woman, 192nd out of the 200 countries taken into consideration by the World Bank). On a global level, things are even more dramatic. Today the economy has reached unprecedented levels of interconnection. Trying to interrupt the intersecting flows of raw materials, semi-

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finished products, and labor would be the equivalent of cutting the veins of the world economic body. In February 2017, the Wall Street Journal reminded American advocates of isolationism of “Newton’s third law of global politics, which is that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”1 It is true that the United States has the highest commercial deficit in the world, but it is also true that it is the second largest exporter of goods in the world. The same article made equally clear that in many sectors today, there is a labor shortage, and that in creating obstacles to immigration, many businesses would be at risk. The attack on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would be first and foremost an attack against the United States. According to an assessment by the Boston Consulting Group in July 2017, given the level of the economy’s integration with Mexico, creating obstacles to imports from that country “would probably kill thousands of US auto jobs.”2 Economist Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego, had affirmed as much a few months earlier. If it were not for NAFTA, he wrote, the entire American automobile industry would have already disappeared, swallowed up by the competition of countries with lower salaries and public debt and fewer social protections. . . . One final perspective must be taken into consideration in this geopolitical panorama of the state of borders. Notwithstanding the eventful shifts in power of current international relations, very few borders have been formally modified since the end of World War II. The bloody events that accompanied the two important exceptions (India in 1947 and Palestine in 1948) have given rise to a warlike swarm that is still with us today. Since that time, a tacit agreement has been in effect between powers large, medium sized, and small to avoid reopening that case. The 122 new states born between 1948 and today (2017) were almost all carved out of preexisting juridical frames. That is what happened in Africa in 1963, when the first gathering of the

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Organization of African Unity (OAU) decided to maintain the borders designated by the colonizers. In 1991, when the Soviet Union was dissolved, the fifteen republics born of its fragmentation assumed the most recent (and, in turn, most arbitrary) internal administrative divisions of the union, and the same thing took place in the former Yugoslavia. In these two cases, each military attempt to modify borders was formally pushed back to the status quo ante, despite territorial changes that had arisen as a result of the wars. The secessionist Republic of Transnistria, for example, though disposing of all the institutions of an independent state, does not exist in the eyes of international law, which recognizes only the Republic of Moldavia, to which it officially belongs. The same is true of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia for the Armenian Republic of Azerbaijan—and for Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. These are juridical fictions, of course, but they show the advantage of maintaining the principle of the intangibility of existing borders. However tacit an agreement there may have been, Russia has broken it with its annexation of Crimea. In the past, there had been other annexations by military means, such as that of Hyderabad (1948) and Goa (1961) by India and of East Timor by Indonesia (1975), but only the case of Goa provoked international tensions along the fault line of the Cold War. In 1961, India was not yet a great power, and its military aggressions were mostly just a further occasion for verbal sparring between the two superpowers that at that moment were caught up in the much more delicate tug-of-war over Cuba. The Russian annexation of Crimea in 2104 has completely different repercussions. Its regional, continental, and global implications constitute without a doubt the first act of a drama of incalculable costs: that of revising the border born of the conflicts of the twentieth century. The first person to speak of this openly, in April 2014, was Russian historian Alexei Fenenko, according to whom a “coordinated revision” of the frontiers in the Ukraine might become the order of

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the day, keeping in mind, however, that this would require shifts of borders in Central and Eastern Europe as well, notably in Poland and Hungary.3 More than a proposal, it seemed a threat. It was not for nothing that Vladimir Putin, in an interview in September 2016, reintroduced Fenenko’s idea, reminding people that in that part of the world, there are at least twelve countries that could advance territorial claims over hundreds of thousands of square miles transferred from one country to another after World War II: “If someone wants to open that Pandora’s box and start to work with it, go ahead,” Putin said. “Take up the flag and go for it.”4 Also in 2014, after the proclamation of the so-called caliphate in the Sunni regions of Iraq and Syria, a hypothesis of a redo of the borders in the Middle East began to circulate insistently. The most talked-about solution seemed to respond to a certain logic: Shiite Iraqis on one side, Sunni Iraqis and Syrians on another, and Kurds on still another, with a “useful” Syria in the hands of Assad or whoever would stand in for him. In reality, that such a solution would ever be adopted is improbable for at least three reasons, listed here in order of increasing seriousness. The first is that the situation on the ground is rather more complex: even admitting that it is possible to find a border between Sunnis and Shiites, in the Sunni regions there also live Christians, Kurds, Shiites, Ishmaelites, Druze, Yazidis, Turkmens, and Assyrians. If the principle of redrawing borders according to ethnoreligious criteria were to prevail, it would open the floodgates to a colossal operation of ethnic cleansing, one already begun, moreover, during the war. Unable to constitute their own territorial “state,” Christians, Kurds, Shiites, Ishmaelites, Druze, Yazidis, Turkmens, and Assyrians would all be forced to flee. The second is that war has broken out as a result of the ambitions and fears of local actors, above all, the Iranians, Saudis, Turks, and Kurds, in addition, of course, to the Iraqis and Syrians. No matter what the blueprint would be for any new, hypothetical borders, someone would necessarily be unhappy, and this would have to be compensated for in some way or defeated

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before an agreement were ever reached. In both cases, the conditions would be created for a new future instability. If we add to this picture the ambitions and fears of the great powers, the calculus becomes extremely unpredictable and complex. The third reason, finally, is that the creation of new borders in the Middle East would vindicate Putin and Pandora’s box would indeed be opened. The risk of a generalized war of all against all, which the African nations feared to see on their continent in 1963, would multiply on a world scale. What’s more, the only two borders that have been modified with the consensus of the “international community,” both in Africa itself, have given rise to new states—Eritrea and South Sudan— that hold two unenviable records: the first is the country that, proportional to its population, has produced the highest number of political refugees in the world; the second has produced the greatest number of victims of a civil war. In sum, borders are politically voluble and capricious things. They must be handled with care and wisdom so as not to become permanent threats hanging over humanity’s heads like the sword of Damocles. The hope is that this book will do its small part.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 2. Michel Foucher, Le retour des frontières (Paris: Éditions CNRS, 2016), 8. CHAPTER 1

1. Alison G. Kesby, “The Shifting and Multiple Border and International Law,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 2 (2007): 101– 119. 2. Lewis H. Morgan, Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881). The phrase “communism in living” comes up forty times in the text. 3. Titus Livius (Livy), The History of Rome (Ab Urbe condita libri ), I, 7 (translation by Benjamin Oliver Foster). www.perseus .tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0151%3Ab ook%3D1%3Achapter%3D7. 4. Of course, we are talking of an empire from the point of view of territorial extension, not an institutional point of view. At 89

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that time, Rome was a republic; it formally became an empire only under Octavian Augustus in 27 BCE. 5. Raetia was a region of the Roman Empire corresponding to the current Tyrol, part of Bavaria, and the Swiss canton of Grisons. 6. W. Gordon East, The Geography behind History: How Physical Environment Affects Historical Events (New York: Norton, 1967), 98. 7. Philippe Moreau Defarges, Introduction à la géopolitique (Paris: Seuil, 2009), 34–35. 8. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 107. 9. The judgment Milirrpum v. Nabalco Pty Ltd. (1971). 10. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 74. 11. John Reed, The War in Eastern Europe (New York: Scribner, 1916), 180–181. 12. Note that the 1914 census already distinguished the population into Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and . . . Muslims. The transformation of the Muslims into an ethnic group instead of a religious group (on the model of the Jews) became a characteristic of the Balkans and was also adopted by Tito’s Yugoslavia in the late 1960s. 13. The English page of Wikipedia lists 103 cases of ethnic cleansing, massacres, and forced displacement of entire populations from the beginning of the twentieth century to the first decade of the twenty-first century. 14. Dietrich von Bülow, Vom Geist des neuern Kriegssystems hergeleitet aus dem Grundsatze einer Basis der Operationen auch für Laien in der Kriegskunst (Hamburg: bei Benjamin Gottlieb Hofmann, 1799), 354. 15. Lord Curzon of Kedlestone, Frontiers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 54. 16. According to Tullio De Mauro, in 1955 only a little over 10 percent of Italians had successfully mastered the official language,

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and almost everyone continued to use local dialect for everyday communication. See Sabino Cassese, ed., “La culture et la langue,” in Portrait de l’Italie actuelle (Paris: La Documentation française, 2001), 143. 17. Estimate from Bloomberg News: see PBS, “The True Cost of the Bank Bailout,” September 3, 2010. 18. According to Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, a theorist of the French Revolution, “The Third Estate embraces then all that which belongs to the nation; and all that which is not the Third Estate, cannot be regarded as being of the nation” (Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État? January 1789). 19. Tusculanae disputationes, Libro V, 37. 20. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992) had been preceded by the essay “The End of History?” National Interest (Summer 1989): 3–18, therefore before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. 21. Francis Fukuyama, “The History at the End of History,” Guardian, April 3, 2007. 22. Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). 23. Pankaj Ghemawat, “Why the World Isn’t Flat,” Foreign Policy, October 14, 2009. 24. Friedman, The World Is Flat, 537. 25. Harm De Blij, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 26. Mitterrand’s advisor Jacques Attali told Gorbachev, “France by no means wants German reunification,” and “the spectre of reunification was causing nightmares among France’s politicians. . . . Mr. Mitterrand would fly off to live on Mars if this happened.” See Michael Binyon, “Thatcher Told Gorbachev Britain Did Not Want German Reunification,” Times, September 11, 2009. 27. Michel Foucher, L’obsession des frontières (Paris: Perrin, 2007), 115, 116.

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28. Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations (New York: Penguin, 1993), 14. The book, published for the first time in 1987, reintroduces a text originally written in 1963. 29. Globalization: A Brief Overview, May 2008, www.imf.org/ external/np/exr/ib/2008/053008.htm. 30. Robert J. Samuelson, “The Shutdown Heralds a New Economic Norm,” Washington Post, October 14, 2013. 31. Philip Stephens, “US Politics Is Closing the Door on Free Trade,” Financial Times, April 7, 2016. CHAPTER 2

1. Olivier Weber, Frontières (Paris: Éditions Paulsen, 2016), 273. 2. Harm De Blij, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3. 3. Data from Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations.” For international migration: “Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2015 Revision; for internal migration: “Cross-National Comparisons of Internal Migration: An Update on Global Patterns and Trends” (Technical Paper No. 2013/1). 4. United Nations Population Fund, “International Migration 2013.” 5. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in 2014 there were 6,046 refugees in the world from developed countries, equivalent to 0.03 percent of the total, almost all (4,987) from the United States. 6. “Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2015 Revision.” UNHCR estimates 21.3 million transnational refugees for 2015. The total number of refugees, both internal and external, is taken as well from UNHCR (2016): www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html. 7. Data from the International Organization for Migration (IOM). For 2015, the data are quoted as of December 18, and for

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2016, as of July 13. On December 18, 2015, the IOM also recorded 736 victims in the seas of Southeast Asia, 223 on the border between Mexico and the United States, 139 on European land borders, 94 in the Horn of Africa, 85 in the Sahara and North Africa, and 141 in the rest of the world, for a total of 5,113. Thus, the Mediterranean accounted for 72 percent of all emigration victims. 8. De Blij, The Power of Place, 3. 9. Kam Wing Chan, Ta Liu, and Yunyan Yang, “Hukou and Non-Hukou Migrations in China: Comparisons and Contrast,” International Journal Population Geography 5 (1999): 425–448. 10. Their name changes depending on the country: bidonville in French, baraccopoli in Italian, favela in Portuguese, villas miserias in Spanish, gecekondu in Turkish, township in South Africa. 11. Teresa Pires do Rio Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in Sao Paulo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 2. 12. Gilles Kepel, Leyla Arslan, and Sarah Zouheir, “Les banlieues de la République” (Paris: Institut Montaigne, October 2011). 13. www.businessinsider.com/queens-languages-map-2017-2. 14. Henz Streib, Christopher F. Silver, Rosina-Martha Csöff, Barbara Keller, and Ralph W. Hood, Deconversion: Qualitative and Quantitative Results from Cross-Cultural Research in Germany and the United States (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 43. 15. Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Ntuppuppakkoranendarnnu (My grandad had an elephant) 1951. The extract quoted here is taken from the French edition (Paris: Zulma, 2005), 92–93, 105. The exclamation “Yah-Rabb al-’Alamin!” literally means “Lord of the whole universe!” 16. On Constantine’s role at the Council of Nicaea, see Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 167–171. 17. The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church Canonical and Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church Noncanonical in 1990. The Orthodox Church of the Kiev Patriarchate, established

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in 1992, which compete with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (1990, former Ukrainian exarchate of the Moscow Patriarchate). 18. The countries where Catholics represent less than 0.1 percent of the population are (in ascending order) Afghanistan, Somalia, North Korea, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Maldives, Yemen, Azerbaijan, Nepal, Mongolia, Turkey, and Bhutan. In another thirty-one countries, they represent less than 1 percent of the population, and in fifty other countries less than 10 percent (various sources). 19. Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 158. 20. In seven Indian states, anticonversion laws are in effect. During the 2014 election campaign, the secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party promised an anticonversion law at the federal level (it was still not voted on in 2016). 21. This is what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have stated in May 2014 according to Le Monde Juif: “Caractère juif de l’État d’Israël: Netanyahu révèle ses premières propositions,” May 9, 2014. 22. Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1. 23. Ibid., 6. 24. It goes without saying that the difference is relative: the vast majority of religions that have appeared on earth have in fact disappeared, and those that currently exist have been transformed over the centuries in trying to adapt to changing environmental circumstances. 25. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 26. Quoted from Ben Norton, “After Brussels, Far-Right Islamophobes Are Doing Exactly What ISIS Wants Them to Do: Threatening the ‘Gray Zone,’” Salon, March 22, 2016. Kufr is an Arabic term for the camp of those who do not believe in the God of Islam.

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27. Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, December 3, 1851, commenting on the coup of Louis Bonaparte that had taken place the day before. http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/1851/letters/51_12_03 .html. 28. “Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2015 Revision.” 29. Katja Ulbert, “Refugee Crisis Balkans and Central Europe,” https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/fr/map/refugee-crisis-balkans-and -central-europe_55091#6/41.500/23.730. 30. Google has announced that the morning after the referendum, the search, “What if we go out from the EU?” increased by 250 percent among the British Internet users, followed by “What is the EU?” 31. Olivier Weber in Frontières tells that when he was “detained” at a border post between Turkey and Iran, he learned of the “arrival of a shipment of French passports meticulously forged and printed in Thailand, in the possession of local traffickers who resell them to illegal immigrants by the ream” (45). 32. Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen, Borders: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 64, 65. 33. www.usborderpatrol.com/Border_Patrol740.htm. 34. Weber, Frontières, 51. 35. www.fao.org/emergencies/emergency-types/transboundary -animal-diseases/en/. 36. Diener and Hagen, Borders, 113. Starting in 1996, France cashed in a credit of 1.37 billion francs from the European Community (one-quarter of the total European aid) to support its farmers,. Three years later, it was the only country that refused to lift the embargo. 37. Andrea Vuković, “From Truce Line to Line of Uncertainty of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Srpska Times, October 9, 2013. 38. Michel Foucher, L’obsession des frontières (Paris: Perrin, 2007), 108.

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CHAPTER 3

1. Michel Foucher, L’obsession des frontières (Paris: Perrin, 2007), 162. 2. Ibid., 146. The Council of Europe has forty-seven member countries, including Russia, Turkey, and the Caucasus countries. 3. This point is repeatedly brought up in Makinder’s Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction (London: Constable, 1919). 4. Foucher, L’obsession des frontières, 116. 5. Signed in 1985 by West Germany, France, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg, the Schengen Agreements were absorbed into the European Union institutional system in 1999, with an opt-out clause for the United Kingdom and Ireland. At the time of writing this book in summer 2016, they were in deep crisis, suspended in whole or in part by nine of the signatory countries. According to a German study, reestablishment of internal borders would cost European countries between 26 and 65 billion euros per year (Anna auf dem Brinke, “The Economic Costs of NonSchengen: What the Numbers Tell Us” [Berlin: Jacques Delors Institut, April 20, 2016]). According to another study (Vincent Aussilloux and Boris Le Hir, “The Economic Cost of Rolling Back Schengen,” France Stratégie, April 14, 2016), the cost would be at least $100 billion per year. 6. In 2016, it included nineteen of the twenty-eight European Union countries. 7. Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us about Coming Conflicts and the Battle against Fate (New York: Random House, 2012), 144. 8. The Sykes-Picot Agreement is a secret convention signed by France and the United Kingdom (with the backing of Russia and Italy) that stipulated the division of the Ottoman Middle East among the four Entente powers at the end of World War I. 9. James Barr, A Line in the Sand: Britain, France, and the Struggle That Shaped the Middle East (London: Simon & Shuster, 2011), 12.

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10. Quoted from Lawrence James, The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2014), 129. Lawrence’s italics. 11. Steve Almasy and Jason Hanna, “Saudi Arabia Launches Airstrikes in Yemen,” CNN, March 26, 2015. 12. Michel Foucher, Frontières d’Afrique: Pour en finir avec un mythe (Paris: Éditions CNRS, 2014), 10, 11,14. This statement is somewhat counteracted by the following statement on p. 45 of the same book: “Between the late 1950s and late 1990s, half of the African States were involved in border conflicts.” 13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed _conflicts. Others are in the Middle East (four), the rest of Asia (two), one in America (drug cartels in Mexico), and one in Europe (the Donbas). 14. According to Virgil Hawkins, Stealth Conflicts: How the World’s Worst Violence Is Ignored (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 25. 6 percent of the remaining victims are Asian, 4 percent are from the Middle East, and 1 percent are Americans and European. 15. Monty G. Marshall, ed., Conflict Trends in Africa, 1946– 2004: A Macro-Comparative Perspective (Arlington, VA: Center for Global Policy, George Mason University, 2006), 53–61. The document was published by the British Ministry of Defense. Since 2004, there have been dozens of coups. The number of coups in Latin America between 1960 and 2004 comes from research conducted by the author of this book. For comparison, Sub-Saharan Africa has thirty-eight countries, Latin America, thirty-three. 16. George Friedman, The Geopolitics of Turkey: Searching for More (Austin, TX: Stratfor, 2010), 7. 17. Foucher, Frontières d’Afrique, 18. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou, “The LongRun Effects of the ‘Scramble for Africa,’” Vox, CEPR Policy Portal, December 24, 2015. The cited book by Murdock is Africa: Its

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Peoples and Their Culture History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959). 21. William Easterly, Alberto Alesina, and Janina Matuszeski, “Artificial States” (Working Paper No. 100), Center for Global Development, Washington, DC, September 2006, 4. 22. Ibid., p. 7. 23. Foucher, Frontières d’Afrique, 36, 37. 24. Ibid., 41. Internal trade on the continent is higher in Latin America (18 percent) and Southeast Asia (40 percent); it should be taken into account that informal trade does not appear in official statistics. 25. Adama Gaye, “Union africaine: Le naufrage de l’unité,” Courrier International, July 21–27, 2016. 26. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Knopf, 1966), 11. 27. G. Patrick March, Eastern Destiny: Russia in Asia and the North Pacific (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 18. 28. Foucher, L’obsession des frontières, 168. 29. Its warmest sea, the Sea of Japan in front of Vladivostok, is frozen and therefore unsuitable for navigation, so it is open only three months a year; the Sea of Okhotsk, between the Kamchatka Peninsula and the island of Sakhalin, four months; the Gulf of Finland, in front of St. Petersburg, six months; finally, the Barents Sea, a part of the Arctic Ocean, is frozen eleven months out of twelve. 30. The data on the length of the coasts are from the 2008 CIA World Factbook. According to an article in the Economist, the per capita GDP of countries lacking access to the sea is on average 40 percent lower than the countries with access. “Interiors. Why It’s Better to Have a Coastline,” Economist, May 9, 2015. 31. Ibid., 162. 32. The warlord Sheng Shicai was under the command of the Soviet consul in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang. In 1937, he organized a series of show trials against a “fascist-Trotskyist conspiracy” that led to the elimination of 435 Chinese Communists. In

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1943, he executed all the members of a Chinese Communist Party delegation, including Mao’s brother, that he himself had invited to Urumqi. 33. George Friedman, The Geopolitics of China: A Great Power Enclosed (Austin, TX: Stratfor, 2012). 34. Between 1841 and 1914, thirteen British concessions were established, eight Japanese, six French, four Russian, four German, two American, and one each in Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Belgium. 35. Bonnie S. Glaser, “Armed Clash in South China Sea” (Contingency Planning Memorandum No. 14), Council on Foreign Relations (April 2015). 36. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 37. A book on borders cannot fail to include a reference to the Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal, signed in 1494 under the auspices of the Spanish pope of the house of Borja, Alexander VI. The treaty established the borders for non-European conquests of the two Iberian powers. Modified in 1506, it was then rendered ineffectual by the arrival of other colonial powers (Holland, France, England, and Denmark) that overtly demanded their part of the colonial spoils. This was the first attempt to divide the world into spheres of influence. 38. Bolivia has never ceased to claim an outlet to the ocean. Despite the absence of diplomatic relations between the countries since 1978, today Chile guarantees to Bolivia unrestricted access to the sea through the Atacama corridor. 39. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography, 65. 40. John O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17 (1845): 5–10. 41. Thomas Starr King, Patriotism, and Other Papers (Boston: Tompkins and Company, 1864), 36. 42. Alfred Mahan, “The United States Looking Outward,” Atlantic Monthly (December 1890). The definition of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico as “the American Mediterranean”

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AN D

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belongs to the geographer and strategist Nicholas Spykman; see his America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (1942; reprint ed., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007) 46–49. 43. Cited in Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 38. 44. Provided there is a state capable of finding a synthesis between the various internal interests (the “common interest”); if not, economic pluralism is followed by a civil war. 45. Robert J. Samuelson, “The Shutdown Heralds a New Economic Norm,” Washington Post, October 14, 2013. 46. Roger D. Hodge, “Borderworld: How the U.S. Is Reengineering Homeland Security,” Popular Science, January 17, 2012. If we include additional expenses (for example, environmental impact studies), the total sum reaches $3.4 billion. 47. “Support for Mexican Border Fence Up to 68%,” Rasmussen Reports, July 29, 2010. 48. Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, “More Mexicans Leaving Than Coming to the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, November 19, 2005. 49. Editorial Board, “The Border Patrol’s Bizarre Choice,” New York Times, April 5, 2016. C O N C LU S I O N

1. “Mexico Responds to Trump: Our Southern Neighbors Aren’t Rolling Over to His Political Demands,” Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2017, www.wsj.com/articles/mexico-responds -to-trump-1487978920. 2. Quoted by Ana Campoy, “The US’s Proposals for Bringing Back Auto Jobs Would More Likely Kill Them Instead,” Quartz, July 19, 2017, https://qz.com/1033405/withdrawing-from-nafta -would-more-likely-kill-jobs-instead-of-adding-them. 3. Alexei Fenenko, “A Coordinated Revision of Eastern Europe,” Valdai Discussion Club, April 23, 2014. http://valdaiclub .com/a/highlights/a_coordinated_revision_of_eastern_europe/.

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4. John Micklethwait, “Putin Discusses Trump, OPEC, Rosneft, Brexit, Japan (Transcript),” Bloomberg News, September 1, 2016, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-05/putin-discusses -trump-opec-rosneft-brexit-japan-transcript.