indicator of the extent of national property, not merely as a line on the surface of the land but rather as a line of separation that also runs deep beneath the ground and demarcates airspace as well, it immediately assumes an essential aura of honor and a sense of sublimity. Some of these markings have been based on distant history, others on pure mythology. In such contexts, every shred of primordial knowledge that indicates the presence or control of the ostensible core or majority “ethnic” group of a modern nation over any parcel of land is used as a pretext for annexation, occupation, and colonization. Every marginal mythos or trivial legend from which it is possible to exploit an ounce of legitimacy for territorial rights and demarcation becomes an ideological weapon and an important building block in the construction of national memory.45
Ancient battlefields become sites of pilgrimage. The graves of the dictatorial founders of kingdoms as well as those of brutal rebels become official state historical sites. Consistently secular proponents of nationalism imbue inanimate landscapes with primordial and even transcendental elements. Democratic revolutionaries, including socialists who preach the brotherhood of nations, invoke wistful memories of monarchical, imperial, and even religious pasts in order to affirm and establish their control of as large a territory as possible.
In addition to aggressively gaining immediate ownership, it was generally necessary to invoke an extended dimension of time that enveloped the national space and endowed it with an air of timeless eternity. Being relatively abstract, the large political homeland was always in need of both stable points of reference in time and tangible spatial features. For this reason, as has already been asserted above, geographers, like historians, became part of the new pedagogic theology. According to this theology, national land ate into the long-term hegemony of the divine and, to a great extent, converted the heavens: in the modern era, god could be spoken of with much more irony than could ancestral lands.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the large, abstract homeland was by far the most dominant force in national and international politics. Millions died in its name, others died for its sake, and multitudes sought to continue living only within its borders. Like all other historical phenomena, however, its power was neither absolute nor (perhaps it is needless to say) eternal.
Not only did the homeland have external borders that delineated its territory, it also had an internal border that limited its psychological presence. People who struggled under the burdens of life or were unable to support their family with dignity tended to migrate to other countries. In doing so, they also exchanged national territories the way most people replace a garment that was once attractive but is now frayed—nostalgically, but with determination.
Mass immigration is no less characteristic of modernization than are the nationalization of populations and the construction of homelands. Despite the pain of pulling up roots and journeying to unknown destinations, many millions of people facing poverty, economic crises, persecution, and other such threats in the modern era have attempted to relocate to a living space that appeared to promise a more secure livelihood than did their country of origin. The difficult process of laying down new roots in an acquired home-land also turned immigrants into patriots, and even if the process was not always successful in the first generation, the new homeland inevitably struck deep roots within the hearts and minds of subsequent generations.
Throughout history, political phenomena emerge and ultimately vanish. The national homeland that started to take form in the late eighteenth century and turned into the “normal” and normative space of all those who became its citizens began to show the first signs of exhaustion at the end of the twentieth century. The phenomenon is, of course, still far from disappearing, and in “remote” corners of the globe people are still dying for tracts of national land. In other regions, however, traditional borders are already starting to dissolve.
The market economy that long ago demolished the small home-land and played an important role in constructing national homelands and delineating them within impenetrable borders has begun to partially erode its own previous creations, aided in this effort by the political elite and, to a greater extent, audiovisual and online media. The decline in value of agricultural cultivation as a means for creating economic wealth has also helped weaken the psychological power of the patriotism of the past. Today when Frenchmen, Germans, or Italians leave their homeland, neither the state nor its watchdogs are present at the border. Europeans now move within territorial spaces that have adopted completely new boundaries.
Verdun, which may be a symbol of the folly of twentieth-century patriotism, has become a popular tourist site. Ironically, today at Verdun no notice is taken of the passports or national identities of the Europeans who visit it. Although Europe’s newly ordained land borders are undoubtedly steeper and at times no less brutal than the previous ones, the territories that lie within them no longer possess all the attributes of the old political homelands.
Frenchmen will apparently never again die for France, and Germans will most likely never again kill for Germany (or vice-versa). The Italians, on their part, will most likely continue the tradition embodied in the rant by the cynical elderly Italian man from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 that appears as an epigraph at the beginning of the present chapter.
Although conventional mass killing has become increasingly problematic and complicated in the nuclear age, we cannot rule out the possibility that humans will find new ways of killing and being killed in the future. If they do, however, most likely it will be for the sake of a new, and as yet unknown, version of politics.
1 “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” Horace, Odes 3.2 in Odes and Epodes, Cambridge: Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library), 2004, 144–5. These lines were written between 23 and 13 BCE. In its Zionist incarnation, the same sentiment was articulated using the words “It is good to die for our country,” which were attributed to Josef Trumpeldor, a pioneering Jewish settler who was killed in 1920 in a clash with local Arabs. As Trumpeldor had studied Latin in his younger years, he may have in fact quoted Horace just before his death.
2 On the relationship between the Russian term rodina and the German term heimat, see Peter Bickle, Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland, New York: Camden House, 2002, 2–3.
3 New York: Atheneum, 1970.
4 For more on this, see Geoffrey Gorer, “Ardrey on Human Nature: Animals, Nations, Imperatives,” in Ashley Montagu (ed.), Man and Aggression, London: Oxford University Press, 1973, 165–7.
5 Ardrey, Territorial Imperative, 5.
6 Ibid., 6–7.
7 Quoted in David Thomas Murphy, The Heroic Earth: Geopolitical Thought in Weimar Germany, 1918–1933, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997, 9.
8 For more on Haushofer, see ibid., 106–10.
9 It took geopolitics quite some time to recover from its experience under Nazi rule, but by the 1970s it had already been reintroduced as a legitimate field of study. See David Newman, “Geopolitics Renaissant: Territory, Sovereignty and the World Political Map,” in David Newman (ed.), Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity, London: F. Cass, 1999, 1–5.
