the exact value of private property, including land, this is not true of collective national property; because the assets in question have no market, it is difficult to calculate their exact worth.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Napoleon could still sell the great Louisiana Territory of North America without eliciting any protest on the part of those who had just started to become French. And in 1867, when Russia sold Alaska (for the paltry sum of $7.2 million), the Russians hardly complained, and some Americans even protested the acquisition as a pointless waste of their money. Such acts of financial quantification and transfer of state property subsequently lost all validity and would not be repeated in the twentieth century.
In contrast, from the beginning of the twentieth century onward, new patriotic wars took the lives of massive numbers of victims. One example was the 1916 Battle of Verdun, one of the bloodiest and fiercest battles of the First World War. On a small patch of no-man’s-land just a few square kilometers in area, more than 300,000 French and German soldiers were killed over a period of months, and far more than half a million were left wounded and disabled. Certainly, not all the soldiers remained in the wet, putrid trenches of their own free will. Although by that stage in the so-called Great War they thirsted for it much less than they had at its outset, most were still devoted to the supreme imperative of defending the homeland and suff used with a patriotic desire to avoid giving up even one kilometer of its territory. During the twentieth century, the prospect of dying for the homeland imbued male fighters with the sense that no other death could achieve such timeless nobility.
BORDERS AS BOUNDARIES OF SPATIAL PROPERTY
“Territory is no doubt a geographical notion, but it’s first of all a juridico-political one: the area controlled by a certain kind of power.”40 Despite the accuracy of this assessment by Michel Foucault, it fails to capture the true status of national space. The final sculpting of national territory is undertaken with the enthusiastic support of the subjects-turned-citizens: that is to say, its legal proprietors. It also requires the agreement of neighboring states and, at some stage, the authorization of international law. As in the case of all socio-legal manifestations, the border is primarily a historical product of power relations that at a certain point in time were recognized and frozen.
Fluid borders between large and small territories have existed throughout history, but they differed from the borders of the modern era. They were not geometrical lines but, rather, wide strips that lacked definition and permanence; in the case of natural objects—mountains, rivers, valleys, forests, deserts—that separated kingdoms from one another, the entire object served as the border. In the past, it was uncertain to which political authority many villages belonged, and, truth be told, many were uninterested in finding out. It was rulers who had a vested interest in recording their not-always-so-loyal taxpayers.
Many of today’s international borders were delineated in an arbitrary and incidental manner, and the delineation took place before the emergence of the nations in question. Empires, kingdoms, and principalities demarcated the areas under their control through diplomatic agreements at the conclusion of wars. But the numerous territorial conflicts of the past did not result in prolonged world wars, and, in many cases, the primary impetus for armed struggle was not a craving for land itself. Prior to the growth of nationalism, territorial boundaries were never an issue about which no concessions could be made under any circumstances.
In this context, Peter Sahlins’s rich empirical work offers particularly cogent insight.41 Sahlins closely traced the evolution of the border between France and Spain in the Pyrenees from the seventeenth century onward, and observed that sovereignty under the old regime was applied much more to inhabitants than to territory. The slow, prolonged formation of the border, which began as an imaginary line marked in an extremely inaccurate manner by means of noncontiguous stones, reached a turning point during the French Revolution. By 1868, however, when the final border was agreed upon, territory had become the official property of the nation. The transition from a breached frontier zone to clearly demarcated territorial areas represented the domestication of space and its transformation into a homeland.42
Benedict Anderson advanced the same idea in his pioneering book Imagined Communities:
In the modern conception, state sovereignty is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimeter of a legally demarcated territory. But in the older imagining, where states were defined by centers, borders were porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another.43
Like all first-time capitalists vis-à-vis their initial accumulation of assets, all nation-states at their first stage of evolution are hungry for space and thus driven to expand their borders and increase their landed property. For example, the United States came into being with an inherent inclination to annex additional territory. It refused, in fact, to recognize its own borders and acknowledged only flexible “frontier” areas that would presumably get incorporated into it at some point in the future. This was typical behavior for all settler states, whether in Africa, Australia, or the Middle East.44
The French Revolution, on the other hand, pursued the idea of “natural borders,” on whose basis the revolutionaries strove to expand their state in the direction of major rivers and tall mountains that were often located far outside its “artificial” borders. In this manner, the French revolutionary imagination, followed by the Napoleonic imagination, claimed the Rhine region and the Low Countries as organic parts of greater France. From its outset, the National Socialist revolution in Germany invoked the logic of “living space,” which for the Nazis included Poland, the Ukraine, and western Russia, and which had a decisive impact on the outbreak of the Second World War.
It is no coincidence that the first nation-states also became the leading colonial powers. The causes and conditions for their territorial expansion were undoubtedly economic impulses and the increasing power and technological superiority of Western Europe. However, the patriotic masses’ enthusiastic support for colonial expansion also played an important role in the insatiable drive to enlarge the territory under imperial control. At the same time, the frustration felt by large masses in states that missed out on the division of territorial spoils pushed many into the arms of a more aggressive radical nationalism.
Even nation-states that emerged in the Third World in opposition to colonial rule began to establish their territories in fierce border conflicts. The disputes between Vietnam and Cambodia, Iran and Iraq, and Ethiopia and Eritrea, for instance, did not differ substantially from the conflicts of a century earlier between Britain and France, France and Prussia, and Italy and Austria. The wave of democratic nationalism in Eastern Europe resulted in the final battles fought in the former Yugoslavia for the formation of the “correct” borders of the old continent.
The process of transforming land into national property typically began in the ruling centers but subsequently entered the broader social consciousness, fueling and complementing the process of appropriation from the bottom up. Unlike the situation in premodern societies, the masses themselves served as the high priests and guardians of the new sacred land. And as in the religious rituals of the past, the sacred area was unequivocally separated from the secular area surrounding it. Thus, in the new world, every centimeter of common property became part of the hallowed national territory that could never be relinquished. That is not to say that the external secular space would never become internal and sacred, as the annexation of additional land to national territory was always regarded as a classic act of patriotism. From the homeland, however, it was forbidden to take even one clump of earth.
Once
