Sunday, August 12, 2007

Things sometimes are as they are

It is an odd world with borders and all. I feel like many nation-states have been searching for "organic" borders but truly that rarely exists. Most states are the result of empires which forcefully included several ethnicities or are the result of colonial administrative units which did the same. The exceptions are largely in Europe and the Americas, but even there there is massive controversy in many cases. Usually the only areas where controversy over borders is week is where borders have existed in their current form for a hundred or so years. This is pretty rare however when you think globally, so people are bound to be upset by borders and claim that this land was ours historically, or this land has a demographic for us now, or this land had a demographic for us 80 years ago. The truth is demographics change, sometimes forcefully, sometimes non-forcefully, but they always change, and in the end we have to just get used to it. Ultimately the only way to have borders fit populations is to have some world body draw up new borders across the world (because like I said most countries don't have borders that fit with their national demographics), expel all the minorities (usually a process that involves much carnage and heartbreak), and then repeat every so often to account for changing borders. Or we could live with the borders we have, maybe making an exception for massive human rights violations in an area where most of the population favors independence (not just where most of the population is a certain ethnicity). Just a thought.

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