THE DISADVANTAGES OF POLITICAL BOUNDARIES

There are many people who must, often reluctantly, leave their homes and seek to live somewhere else, in order to avoid persecution or warfare in their native lands.  Others have left home voluntarily, perhaps temporarily;  but subsequently find that they can no longer return home due to intervening events that have taken place where they used to live.  We refer to these unfortunate persons as "refugees." 

The United Nations Convention on Refugees, established in 1951, issued specific standards governing the definition of people who might be considered "refugees," and who ought thus be entitled to obtain haven somewhere else.  These standards limited the classification to people with "well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, nationality, membership within a particular social group, or political opinion," who were currently outside of their native lands, and were therefore unable to return.  It is unfortunate to note that, of late, at least 23 million people match this description.  Furthermore, there are, sadly, many millions more who cannot qualify to be officially termed "refugees," because they cannot return home for other reasons.  Such reasons may include famine, as well as various other sorts of natural disasters.  But, sad as many of these situations may be, such victims are not thereby entitled to asylum in the nation-states wherein they happen to find themselves.

Considered in the light of reason, such rules seem illogical.  For they merely consist of application of principles that stem from a source that is equaslly illogical:  the right and ability to exclude and remove peaceful law-abiding men, women, and children from a place, because they happen to have been born, or were previously living, in some other place other than "our" place. 

Borders may also at times serve as a means of trapping people within a place.  This is what occurred in Nazi Germany, when, after November, 1938, a great number of panic-stricken Jews sought to flee their country.  Unfortunately, all that the rest of the civilized world was able to do was debate issues of nationality and citizenship.  In the meantime, at least 300,000 future victims of genocide were forced to remain within the borders of Germany, until their time to ber shipped to the concentration camps arrived.

A particularly terrifying offshoot of this principle of "my" and "our," as applied to geographic territories, are the bulletins that occasionally break into our news broadcasts to tell us that an airplane bearing markings of country "A" has been shot down for violating the airspace over country "B."  In 1955, fifty eight innocent passengers were killed when an Israeli airliner was downed over Bulgaria.  In 1973, in a similar incident, at least 106 people perished when Israeli fighter jets shot down a Libyan Arab Airlines plane.  Another incident of this nature took place in 1983, when Soviet aircraft shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007, sending all 269 human beings on board to their doom.

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The nineteenth century German philosopher Georg Hegel has told us that, like people, states have long competed with each other for "the possession of importance and splendor."  He also expressed the belief that their usual means of attaining these goals was warfare.  Thus, in keeping with this apparently authentic train of thought, nation-states' desires for economic gain, prestige, security, and power become the principal underlying causes which impel them to initiate conflict and bloodshed.  Another German intellectual, Johann von Goethe, expressed a similar, but less flattering appraisal of this rationale, in deeming "national hatred" to be strongest and most violent in "the lowest stages of civilization." 

In his efforts to encourage and promote a union of the separate states that would compose our nation, Thomas Jefferson warned that, as separate states, the components of the hoped-for union could be likened to "an arena of gladiators."  Jefferson's view concerning the unfavorable potential implicit in an array of separate American states holds doubly true when considered with reference to the array of separate nation-states, each begirded within its own bounded patch of ground, in the playing-field that constitutes today's world.

In her benchmark work on natiponalism, Liah Greenfeld of Harvard University compares nineteenth century Russia to an aspiring youth, "eager to prove its worth," who, upon experiencing defeats at the hands of Western foes, was left to "return, humiliated, to the world of inner glory, where it licked its wounds and thought of revenge"  (Nationalism, Five roads to Modernity).  We may thus justifiably compare the nation-state to the individual human person, possessing needs and desires, feelings and frustrations, not ulike those experienced by most of us.  If this be true, then just as union amongst a group of people produces results that frequently exceed the sum of those attainable by the individual members of the group, so too will a union of all of the nations, or people, of the world likely produce accomplishments and benefits in excess of that which we have been able to achieve as a conglomeration of competing and conflicting individual nation-states.

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