Countries Are Fake And Borders Aren't Real

What are your favourite fictions?

Mine are countries and borders. The problem with these particular fictions is that they’ve been made real and literally define our entire existence.

The idea of a country having ‘the right to exist,’ as people are often to demand to affirm when it comes to Israel, is ridiculous. People have a right to exist. States are contingent entities whose existence is conditional on their behaviours. There is no intrinsic right. When it comes to things that break the social contract between the governors and the governed, genocide tops the list. If anything ensures you’ve forfeited a fictional ‘right to exist', the industrialised slaughter of innocents does. So no, Israel doesn’t have a ‘right to exist.’

I don’t understand how politicians still keep getting tripped up by the ‘right to exist’ canard on Israel. The latest to do so was Zohran Mamdani, an insurgent leftist running to be mayor of New York. When asked, he felt he had to defend Israel’s existence for fear of being called an antisemite (which all his opponents call him anyway, so his defence of a genocidal entity won him precisely zero points).

Why didn’t Mamdani, and why don’t politicians who obviously do oppose Israel, turn it on the interviewer and ask whether the Third Reich had a right to exist? Or whether Rhodesia had a right to exist? Or even whether Yugoslavia had a right to exist?

I got in trouble on Twitter when I put Yugoslavia in this list. Some leftists were mad. My point was not to make a direct comparison. And I realise that by the time of the Srebrenica genocide, the entity doing the genocide was effectively a greater Serbia, even if it was still going by the name Yugoslavia under Milosevic. But even your favourite country has no intrinsic right to exist. Sorry, but it doesn’t. In the case of Yugoslavia, it no longer being in existence proves the point, even if its collapse was in part due to, and certainly benefited, imperial powers. Genocide tipped whatever was left of Yugoslavia over the edge, as it should.

In the comments on that post, the obvious gotcha from genocide lovers and Zionists was: ‘Ah! So Palestine has no right to exist either then!’ And the answer is no, it doesn’t. Once again, it not being in existence sort of proves that point, even if, in a parallel with Yugoslavia, its nonexistence is an injustice you can prefer not to have happened.

But Palestinians as a people very much do have the right to exist. And I certainly believe that should be in, and on, their ancestral homelands. If Palestine comes to exist again as a nation-state, it will have earnt the right to exist through struggle, great suffering and resistance. It shouldn’t have required great suffering and mass death to change the reality. But it does. Because we live in the world we live in. A future country of Palestine would actually be a great case study in what it means to have ‘the right to exist.’

These are all tricky issues to discuss because they raise contradictions within our belief systems. If humans should be free, how can borders and countries be justified? If they are justified, how much freedom outside of these borders should we have? And if they aren’t justified, what organising system could they ever be replaced with? In an attempt to head off the rise of the ethno-nationalist right, there has been an attempt to revive a left nationalism in recent years, seen most prominently in the left-wing, anti-EU arguments for Brexit. This attempt collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, primarily on the issue of freedom of movement.

The truth is that borders are arbitrary lines on a map drawn by the powerful who, for centuries, have dictated who can live where and how they can live in those places. We give the things within these lines names, which we call countries. These lines have changed over and over again and the names inside these lines have changed.

But despite all of this, despite all the fake and the fiction, it’s easy to recognise and understand the deep attachment to land that people have, and the identity that creates. In many ways the history of modern nation-states, the history of post-agrarian societies, has been the never-ending tension between celebrating a land-based identity without being sucked into a confrontational nationalist stance.

Europe, after being decimated by two nationalist wars in quick succession, attempted to eradicate this tension with freedom of movement and the effective abolition of borders. The primary criticism from a left-wing perspective was that it enabled the arbitrage of labour, allowing richer countries to supress wages by importing cheaper labour. I always found this a stupid argument. One, people want to move and they will always move, whether you put a strict border in place or not. And they will find work in the place they move too. Better to have a system that eases this natural human inclination rather than punishes it. Two, the suppression of wages is only a problem if your system does not enforce nationwide minimum or living wages. Three, remittances from non-citizen migrants in rich countries to their families in poorer countries keep tens of millions fed and housed.

But perhaps the strongest argument against borders is that they justify and uphold the legitimacy of the most disgusting industry on earth: the weapons industry. Borders and invocations of ‘national security’ are the singular factor behind the legitimacy of an industry that makes fortunes inventing ever-more creative ways to kill a human being in the name of defence.

Just the other day a Greek doctor, after working in Gaza, gave an interview to a Greek paper where he described truly nightmarish scenes made possible by the deeply disturbed people that work for the arms industry. He said that his team would receive the dead bodies of children with small entry wounds, ‘just millimetres’ in size, and they were baffled at the cause of death. CT scans showed they were killed by fragmentation bombs that explode and expel tiny pebbles that enter the body with such velocity and cascade through it so violently they, in the words of this doctor, ‘completely dissolve the spine.'

True liberation for humanity requires the complete abolition of such unspeakable and atrocious weapons and the companies that manufacture them.

And while we have borders, while our leaders are able to talk tough about defence and national security, these companies will continue to make a killing by killing.

True liberation therefore requires the abolition of the borders that justify their existence.

Maybe this is all naively utopian.

Maybe I’m a dreamer.

I’d like to think I’m not the only one.