Do You Have A Flag?

Why do countries need borders? For the same reason that humans need closets - to hide away their skeletons.

The creation of a country - any country - is an incredibly divisive phenomenon. Israel is the most glaring example. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia, China; every single country that has permanent borders, has had to draw and constantly redraw them in blood. Preferably the blood of whoever’s on the other side of the line. Even when the war is contained within, such as in the US civil war, there is an incredible amount of violence and divisiveness - and what is bought at this bloody price is the solemn vow to view a piece of geography as a living creature with a specific mindset - usually one that shelters and justifies the brutalities of its creators.

Much has been said about patriotism, about governance, about unity in diversity and the brotherhood of people from the same country. These reasons are usually mentioned as the intellectual justification behind arbitrary borders. Nonetheless, all of these are emotional reasons - not logical - for the creation of a country. Another oft mentioned justification is that countries and borders are formed to protect people with a particular mindset against others. This logic is fair enough when it comes to protection for pacifists against out-and-out invaders - but in today’s world, these opposing mindsets are usually ‘I want’ and ‘Me too’. There’s no reason to believe that one dude with money on his mind will be less of an ecological nightmare than another. The only reason that humans are conned time and again into supporting endless conflicts over resources is because national ‘leaders’ - and I use the term in its loosest sense - use the fear of ‘wanting-and-not-having’ to convince people that it’s a case of ‘needing-and-not-having’.

Another commonly used reason for the existence of man made borders is the proper use of resources. This ignores the unstated assumption - that everything within the arbitrary boundary is rightfully the property of the humans living within it. There is no reason to say that humans deserve to use a river more than the fish, trees, animals and birds that live around it. The fact that they can’t or don’t express their pain and rage at this rape - yes, rape - is considered proof that humans don’t need to take other living things into account before making territorial decisions.

There is no reason to believe that a ‘country’ is the only social structure that is capable of providing a certain standard of life in a fair and equitable manner. There is no proof that having the military strength to destroy any who oppose you is sufficient to create a sustainable way of life. There is no reason for a boundary - unless, of course, you want to impose your beliefs on those within it.

(There are several obvious critiques of the points made in this article. I don’t intend to address them, for two reasons; one, most of those critiques have been dealt with most excellently in the works of much wiser minds - Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Nash, MK Gandhi, among others. The other reason is quite simply this - pre-empting ‘rational’ (read ‘limited to perfect overlap’) arguments has a way of limiting the point you’re trying to make into a very specific case; as if there is no logic to generalities themselves. The right to life, something that humans reserve for themselves, is one such bit of non-specific logic.)

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