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CHAPTER ONE

Making Homelands: Biological Imperative or National Property?

What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can’t all be worth dying for.

—Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961

The “external frontiers” of the state have to become “internal frontiers” or—which amounts to the same thing—external frontiers have to be imagined constantly as a projection and protection of an internal collective personality, which each of us carries within ourselves and enables us to inhabit the space of the state as a place where we have always been—and always will be—at home.

—Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, 1988

The theoretical discussions of nations and nationalism conducted during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century dedicated only marginal attention to the construction of modern homelands. The territorial space, the “hardware,” in which a nation actualizes its own sovereignty was not paid the same academic consideration as the “soft ware”—the relations between culture and political sovereignty, or the role of historical myths in sculpting the national entity. Nonetheless, just as nation-making projects cannot be carried out without a political mechanism or an invented historical past, they also require a geo-physical imagination of territory, in order both to provide support and to serve as a constant focus of nostalgic memory.

What is a homeland? Is it the place for which Horace once said “it is sweet and fitting” to die? This well-known adage has been quoted by many devotees of nationalism over the past two centuries,¹ although with a different meaning than the one intended by the eminent Roman poet of the first century BCE.

Because many of the terms we use today are derived from ancient languages, it is difficult to distinguish the mental substance of the past from the modern sensitivities of the present. All historical conceptualization undertaken without meticulous historiographical effort presents a potential for anachronism. The concept of “homeland” is one case in point: though the concept exists in many other languages, it does not always carry the same moral baggage, as we have noted.

In the more ancient Greek dialects, we find the term patria () and, somewhat later, patris (), which found its way into ancient Latin as patria. Derived from the noun “father” (pater), the term left its imprint on a number of modern European languages, as in the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese patria, the French patrie, and incarnations in other languages, all of which were derived from the ancient language of the Romans. The meaning of the Latin term gave rise to the English “fatherland,” the German vaterland, and the Dutch vaderland. However, some synonyms base their conception of homeland on the concept of mother, such as the English “motherland,” or the concept of home, such as the English “homeland,” the German heimat, and the Yiddish heim-land (). In Arabic, by contrast, the term watan () is etymologically related to the concept of property or inheritance.

The Zionist scholars who devised the modern Hebrew language, whose mother tongue was typically Russian (and/or Yiddish), adopted the term moledet () from the Bible, apparently following the example of the Russian rodina (), which means something closer to place of birth or family origin. Rodina is somewhat similar to the German heimat, and its echoes of romantic (and perhaps sexual) longing appear to have been consistent with the Zionist connection to the mythological Jewish homeland.²

In any event, the concept of homeland, which made its way to the threshold of the modern era from the ancient Mediterranean via medieval Europe, is associated with various meanings that typically do not correspond with the way it has been understood since the rise of nationalism. But before I delve into the thick of the matter, we must first acknowledge and rid ourselves of a few widely held preconceptions regarding the relationship between humans and the territorial spaces they inhabit.

THE HOMELAND—A NATURAL LIVING SPACE?

In 1966, the anthropologist Robert Ardrey dropped a small sociobiological bombshell that, at the time, had surprisingly potent reverberations throughout a relatively wide readership. His book The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations³ aimed at challenging how we think about territory, borders, and living space. For everyone who until then had believed that defending a home, a village, or a homeland was the product of conscious interests and historical cultural development, Ardrey sought to prove that defined space and the consciousness of borders are deeply ingrained in biology and evolution. He maintained that humans have an instinctual drive to appropriate territory and to defend it by all means necessary, and that this hereditary drive dictates the manner in which all living creatures behave under different conditions.

After extended observations of a variety of animals, Ardrey reached the conclusion that even if not all species are territorial, many are. Among animals of different species, territorialism is a congenital instinct that developed through mutation and natural selection. Meticulous empirical research showed that territorial animals launch ferocious attacks against trespassers on their living space, particularly those of the same species. Conflicts between males in a given space, which scholars formerly viewed as reflecting competition over females, are actually brutal contests over property. Much more surprising was Ardrey’s finding that control of territory imbues those who control it with energies not possessed by outsiders attempting to penetrate it. Among most species, there is “some universal recognition of territorial rights” that conditions and guides all systems of power relations among them.

Why do animals need territory? asks Ardrey. The two most important of the many reasons are (1) animals select specific areas where they can sustain their material existence through access to food and water; and (2) territory serves as a defensive cushion and as protection against enemy predators. These primal spatial needs are rooted in the long process of evolutionary development and became part of the genetic inheritance of “territorialists.” This natural inheritance produces an awareness of borders and provides the basis for flocks and schools. The need of animals to defend their living space impels their collective socialization, and the resulting unified group enters into conflict with other groups of the same species.

Had Ardrey limited himself to an account of animal behavior, his study would have attracted much less attention and remained a subject for debate between experts in ethology, despite his considerable rhetorical skills and colorful language.⁴ His theoretical goals and conclusions, however, were much more ambitious. Going beyond empirical premises within the field of zoology, he also sought to understand the “rules of the game” of human behavior as passed down through the generations. Exposing the territorial dimension of the living world, he believed, would enable us to better understand the nations of the world and the conflicts between them throughout history. On this basis, he reached the following decisive conclusion:

If we defend the title to our land or the sovereignty of our country, we do it for reasons no different, no less innate, no less ineradicable, than do lower animals. The dog barking at you from behind his master’s fence acts for a motive indistinguishable from that of his master when the fence was built.⁵

The territorial aspirations of human beings, then, are manifestations of an ancient biological imperative that shapes the most basic aspects of human behavior. Yet Ardrey goes even further by maintaining “that the bond between a man and the soil he walks on should be more powerful than his bond with the woman he sleeps with,” an assertion he backs up with the rhetorical question, “How many men have you known of, in your lifetime, who died for their country? And how many for a woman?”⁶

This final statement leaves us with no doubt as to its author’s generational identity. As an American born in 1908 and thus a child during the First World War and its aftermath, Ardrey was well aware of the casualties of war. As an adult, he knew many members of the Second World War generation and witnessed the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Written at the beginning of the Vietnam War, his book embodies significant aspects of the international situation of the 1960s. The process of decolonization that commenced in the wake of the Second World War more than doubled the number of hitherto existing “national territories.” Although the First World War was followed by the establishment of a wave of new nations, the process reached its height with the rise of the states of the so-called Third World. Moreover, the wars of national liberation waged in places such as India, China, Algeria, and Kenya paint a picture of an all-encompassing struggle aimed at the acquisition of defined independent national territories. At the end of the fighting, the spread of nationalist sentiment outside the borders of the West endowed the globe with broad diversity and decorated it with close to two hundred colorful national flags.

The scientific imagination of sociobiology typically turns history on its head. Like the rest of the social sciences, sociobiology ultimately tailors its terminology to suit conceptual by-products of social and political processes witnessed by its practitioners in the course of their lives. Sociobiologists, however, are typically unaware that later events in history usually provide a better explanation for earlier events than vice versa. Borrowing most of their terms from social experience, these researchers of nature then adapt them to the task of better understanding the living environment they are studying. Next, they retrain their focus on human society and attempt to better understand it by using terminology and images from the natural world, which were originally borrowed from the conceptualization that accompanies and is produced by historical processes. Consider, for example, how the nationalist wars for territory fought in the 1940s, and the arduous struggles for national homelands waged between the late 1940s and the 1960s, were regarded as catalysts for evolutionary processes genetically ingrained in most living creatures.

Despite the significant differences between the two, the biological determinism of sociobiology bears some resemblance to the equally well-known approach of geographic determinism developed by the German geographer and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel and, later, by Karl Haushofer and others. Although Ratzel himself did not coin the term “geopolitics,” he is nonetheless considered one of its founders. He was also one of the first to firmly incorporate a sophisticated consideration of biological conditions into political geography. Though averse to simple racialist theories, he nonetheless believed that inferior peoples were obligated to support advanced civilized nations and that through such contact they, too, could reach cultural and spiritual maturity.

As a former student of zoology who became a staunch supporter of Darwinist theories, Ratzel was convinced that a nation was an organic body whose development required the constant change of its territorial borders. Just as the skin of all living creatures stretches as they grow, homelands also expand and must necessarily enlarge their borders (although they may also contract and even cease to exist). “A nation does not remain immobile for generations on the same piece of land,” Ratzel declared. “It must expand, for it is growing.”⁷ Although he believed that expansion was contingent on cultural, and not necessarily on aggressive, activity, Ratzel was the first to coin the phrase “living space” (lebensraum).

Karl Haushofer went one step further by developing a theory of national living space; it was no coincidence that his field of research, geopolitics, became popular in territorially frustrated Germany between the two world wars. This academic profession, which had many proponents in Britain, the United States, and, even earlier, in Scandinavia, sought to explain international power relations on the basis of patterns of natural processes. The thirst for space came to play a central role in the theoretical apparatus aimed at providing a general explanation for aggravated tensions between nation-states in the twentieth century.

Geopolitical logic maintained that every nation in the midst of demographic consolidation and growth was in need of living space—that is, the expansion of the original homeland. And because Germany had a smaller per-capita territorial area than the surrounding countries, it had the national and historical right to expand outside its borders. Expansion should supposedly take place in economically weaker regions that had, either in the present or the past, been home to an “ethnic” German population.⁸

Germany’s late entry into the colonial race that began in the late nineteenth century also provided an appropriate environment for popular theories of “living space” to thrive. Germans felt deprived by the division of the territorial spoils of the imperialist superpowers and even more frustrated by the terms of the peace settlement the nation had been forced to accept at the end of the First World War. In this context, according to the above-mentioned theses, it had to strengthen itself territorially, in accordance with the natural law that controlled relations between nations throughout history. Non-German geographers were initially enthusiastic at the prospect.

But when natural law is based entirely on ethnic origin and land, there arises an extremely volatile linkage between geopolitics and ethnocentrism. As a result, the situation in Germany soon exploded. Haushofer and his colleagues did not influence Hitler and his regime so much as they effectively served it, albeit indirectly, by providing the Führer with ideological legitimacy for his insatiable desire for conquest. After the Nazis’ military defeat, their theories were “scientifically” eradicated.⁹ Ardrey’s popular theories were also rather quickly forgotten, and although sociobiological explanations would periodically gain increased attention, their application to the evolution of homelands continued to fade. Despite the appeal of Ardrey’s analysis, ethology ultimately moved away from the strict determinism that characterized his and some of his colleagues’ approaches to territorial behavior.¹⁰

First, it became evident that the developed primates most closely related to human beings—chimpanzees, gorillas, some baboons—are not “territorialists” at all, and that the behavior of animals vis-à-vis their environment is much more diverse than Ardrey’s account might suggest. Even birds, which are arguably the most territorial type of animal, exhibit behaviors that are much more dependent on changes in their surroundings than on hereditary impulses. Experiments involving alterations in animals’ living conditions have proven that aggressive behavior can take on new manifestations in the wake of geo-biological change.¹¹

Anthropologists with broader historical knowledge must never disregard the fact that the human species, which to the best of our knowledge originated on the African continent, flourished and prospered demographically due precisely to the fact that it did not cling to familiar territory but migrated onward and continued to conquer the world with its light legs and swift feet. As time passed, the planet came to be increasingly populated by migrating tribes of human hunters and gatherers who incessantly moved forward in their search for new fields of sustenance and more abundant shores for fishing. Only when nature provided for their basic needs did humans stop in a given area and turn it, to some degree, into their home.

What later bound humans to the land in a stable and permanent manner was not a biological predisposition to acquire permanent territory but the beginning of agricultural cultivation. The transition from nomadism to sedentary settlement first took place around the alluvial soil left by rivers, which improved the land for agriculture without the complex human knowledge typically required to do so. Gradually and increasingly, the sedentary way of life became familiar. It was the cultivation of land that alone provided the basis for the development of territorial civilizations, led by a number of societies that, over time, emerged as great empires.

Yet early kingdoms of this kind—such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China—developed no collective territorial consciousness shared by all those who worked the land. The borders of these immense empires could not be ingrained in popular consciousness as boundaries delineating the living space of farmers or slaves. In all agrarian civilizations, we can assume that land was important to the producers of food. We can also assume that such subjects had a psychological attachment to the land they themselves worked. It is doubtful, however, whether they possessed any sense of connection to the broader territories of the kingdom.

In ancient traditional civilizations, nomadic and agricultural alike, land was sometimes conceived of as a female deity responsible for birthing and creation of everything that lived upon it.¹² Tribes or villages on different continents deemed sacred parts of the land they inhabited, but this attribution of sacred status bore no resemblance to modern patriotism. Land was almost always thought of as the property of the gods, not of human beings. In many cases, ancient humans regarded themselves as paid workers or tenants who were using the land temporarily and were by no means its owners. By means of its religious agents, the gods (or God, with the emergence of monotheism) granted the land to their followers and, when there were lapses in ritual obedience, reclaimed it from them at will.

PLACE OF BIRTH OR CIVIL COMMUNITY?

Unlike Ardrey, who traced the origin of national territorialism to the living world of nature, historians linked the birth of the “homeland” we know today to the emergence of the term in ancient texts. It has been widespread practice for scholars of the past to write about nations as if they had existed since the beginning of civilization. Indeed, not only many popular but also many academic history books have depicted eternal, universal homelands.

Because the historian’s primary raw material, unlike that of the anthropologist, is the written text, historical constructions of the past always begin with and are based on what are usually called primary sources. Historians are of course interested in knowing who produced the source in question, as well as the circumstances of its production, and it is commonly accepted that a “good” historian must first be a cautious philologist. However, we rarely encounter scholars who never lose sight of the fact that almost all the sources that have been passed down from generation to generation (except material remains) were produced by a small class of educated elites who consistently accounted for only a miniscule percentage of all premodern societies.

Such accounts are of extreme importance, as without them we would know very little about history. Nevertheless, any assumption, determination, or conclusion regarding the worlds of the past that does not take into consideration the subjectivity and narrow intellectual perspective of all written testimony—whether literary, legal, or from some other realm of social activity—is ultimately worth very little. Historians, who presumably are aware of the technology of their own narrative reconstructions, must recognize that they will never know the true thoughts and feelings of those who worked the land, the silent majority of all past societies who left behind no written remnants. As we know, every tribe, village, and valley had its own dialect. Members of nomadic tribes and land-bound farmers, who possessed extremely limited means of communication and lacked basic knowledge of reading and writing, did not need to develop sophisticated vocabulary to work, to give birth, or even to pray. In the world of agriculture, communication was frequently based on direct contact, gestures, and vocal tone, rather than on the all-encompassing abstract concepts formulated by the few educated members of the community and recorded in written texts, some of which we have at our disposal today.

The royal court scribes, philosophers, clergymen, and priests, in cultural and social symbiosis with the landed nobility, the wealthy urban classes, and the warrior class, provided future generations with a great deal of information. The problem is that historians all too often treat this material as an easily accessible, criterionless bank of comprehensive data regarding the basic systems of conceptualization and practices of the society as a whole. This has resulted in the widespread misleading and indiscriminate application to premodern societies of terms such as “race,” ethnos, “nation,” “migration of peoples,” “exile of peoples,” and “national kingdoms.”

Primary sources are like the beam of a searchlight, illuminating small, isolated regions within an otherwise overwhelming sea of darkness. Every historical narrative is ultimately held captive by written remains. Careful researchers know that they must navigate such artifacts with caution and hesitation. They must work with no illusions, knowing that their writing relies on historical products indicative of the spirit of a small elite, representing the very tip of an iceberg that has melted away and can never be fully recreated.

This section offers a brief survey of a number of ancient Mediterranean texts and well-known European texts. Although the following discussion will unfortunately be extremely Eurocentric, its narrow perspective stems much less from any ideological position on my part than from the limitations of my own knowledge.

We begin in ancient Mediterranean society, where we encounter the concept of homeland in relatively early literary works. When the classical poet Homer refers to someone’s land of birth in his epic poem The Iliad, he makes repeated use of the term patrida (). The beloved homeland is also the place for which warriors yearn while away on expeditions or in faraway battles, and where their wives, children, parents, and other family members remain. It is the idealized home to which mythological heroes return—for despite their heroism and great endurance, they too grow weary. It is also the sacred place where fathers are buried.¹³

Some three hundred years later, in his play The Persians, the oldest surviving tragedy, Aeschylus passionately describes the famous battle of Salamis fought between the Hellenic coalition and the Persian armies in 480 BCE. In it, he attributes this cry to his heroes: “Sons of Greece, go!/Free fatherland,/free children, wives,/shrines of our fathers’ gods,/tombs where our forefathers lie./Fight for all we have!” The remains of the invading Persian army also return vanquished to the patrida and their family members in order to bemoan their bitter defeat.¹⁴ But we must also pay heed to the fact that neither Greece nor Persia constituted the homeland of the warriors. Their homeland was their home, their city, their place of origin. It was the small territory where they were born, of which all of its children, its descendants, and its close neighbors possessed firsthand physical knowledge.

Later plays, such as Sophocles’ Antigone, Euripides’ Medea, and other works from the fifth century BCE, also feature the homeland as a place of incomparable importance that must not be abandoned, regardless of the cost. Being displaced from a homeland is always perceived of as eviction from a warm and protective home, as a major disaster, and, albeit rarely, as an exile worse than death. The homeland is the known, the safe, and the familiar, outside of which everything is foreign, threatening, and alienating.¹⁵

A short time later, when the warriors of Syracuse did battle with the Athenians, Thucydides wrote that the former fought to defend their homeland, while their enemies, the Athenians, waged war to annex a foreign land.¹⁶ The concept of homeland appears many times in The History of the Peloponnesian War, but it is not a single place universal to all Hellenes. Although modern proponents of Greek nationalism would have liked it to be otherwise, the patrida of ancient literature is not identical to the land of Greece and cannot be conceived of as such. Historians use the term “homeland” only to refer to a single city-state, a specific polis. For this reason, in Thucydides’ recreation of Pericles’ famous funeral oration, it is Athens that is described as an object of admiration and worship.¹⁷

Greek references to the idea of the homeland suggest a unique and fascinating form of politicization of a territorial site. The home-land and its emotional baggage not only relate to geographic location but are also frequently applied within specific political frameworks. Just as territory was politicized, Hellenic politics were always territorial. To better understand this point, we momentarily direct our attention to the logic of Plato.

Like Thucydides, the Athenian philosopher employs the term “homeland” to refer not to greater Greece but to an individual polis. Here, it is the sovereign city-state, together with its institutions and system of laws, that constitutes the true patrida. Plato repeatedly uses the term not merely in the simple sense of a place of birth or a physical area with its own longed-for landscapes, but primarily for the political entity, including its entire apparatus of civil administration. For example, in his well-known dialogue Critias, Plato attributes the following words to Socrates, in admonishment of his interlocutor:

Has a philosopher like you failed to discover that our country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of understanding? . . . and if she leads us to wounds or death in battle, thither we follow as is right; neither may anyone yield or retreat or leave his rank, but whether in battle or in a court of law, or in any other place, he must do what his city and his country order him; or he must change their view of what is just: and if he may do no violence to his father or mother, much less may he do violence to his country.¹⁸

As in other cases, here, too, the Platonic homeland is a city that constitutes a supreme value to which all other values are subordinate. Its uniqueness and moral power lies in its existence as an area of self-government exercised by sovereign citizens. Because of their great personal interest in this political entity, its members are obligated to defend their homeland—their community. This is also the origin of the need to sanctify it, to incorporate it into religious rituals, to worship it on holidays. Plato’s unconditional patriotic demands revolved around a city-homeland that subordinated individual interests to the needs and values of the collective.

In many ways, the Athenian discourse concerning homeland resembles the modern-day understanding of the term. Loyalty, dedication to place, and willingness to make sacrifices in its name are considered sacred values, not to be questioned and certainly not to be discussed in tones of sarcasm. Superficially, this discourse appears to represent the beginnings of nationalist consciousness, which in the past two centuries has come to enjoy a dominant status in human society. But was the homeland of Thucydides, Plato, and the other Athenians the same national homeland imagined by Benito Mussolini, Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, and millions of other twentieth-century nationalists? At the end of the day, is there indeed nothing new under the sun?

In actuality, these two incarnations of homeland are as different as they are similar. Just as ancient Athenian society employed not representative democracy but direct participatory democracy, so too was it completely unfamiliar with the modern abstract, nationalist concept of homeland. The notion of homeland in the democratic states of ancient Greece was limited to patriotic loyalty to the polis, the small and supremely tangible city-state whose human and physical landscape was well known to all its citizens, owing to their firsthand knowledge of its size and borders. Daily they met its other inhabitants in the agora and joined them in general meetings, celebrations, and theatrical performances. From unmediated experience sprang the essence and intensity of patriotic sentiment, which was, for them, one of the most important areas of social consciousness.

In truth, the level of communication and the limited means of cultural dissemination were insufficient for facilitating the emergence of a large democratic homeland. Despite Aristotle’s dictum (as usually and loosely translated) about man being, by nature, a political animal, that classical human animal was the citizen of a city-state devoid of form, precise maps, newspapers, radio, compulsory education, and other such provisions. Therefore, when the Hellenic world was later united under the leadership of Alexander of Macedonia, the old patriotism of the polis dissolved, just as the democratic dimension disappeared from the everyday life of much of Greece.

In addition, the ethical lines demarcating democracy in the ancient city-state were far from identical to the political boundaries of the modern democracy. The sovereign citizens of the Athenian polis constituted a minority of the city’s overall population and the farmers who cultivated the surrounding lands. Only free males born to parents who already held citizenship were considered to be autochthonous and were incorporated into the electorate and its elected institutions. Women, immigrants, people of mixed descent, and the many slaves possessed no rights and were excluded from self-sovereignty. The universal conception of humanity that would emerge and splinter in the modern era was still unknown in the Mediterranean world, which was rich, refined, and thoroughly elitist.¹⁹

Loyalty to the homeland in the form of devotion to a league of citizens possessing representative self-government would appear in some of the literary works written in Rome during the Republican era. On the eve of its disappearance and its transformation into an immense empire, numerous scholars decorated it with verbal praises that would be preserved in European culture up to the modern era. We have already noted Horace’s famous declaration in Odes about the sweetness of dying for the homeland. More than intending to sanctify national soil, however, the great poet meant to express his devotion to the Republican homeland, or the res publica, just after Julius Caesar buried it forever.

In The Catiline Conspiracy, Roman historian Gaius Sallustius Crispus, a loyal follower of Caesar’s, identified the homeland with liberty, as distinct from to the rule of the few.²⁰ The same was true of Marcus Tullius Cicero, the statesman whose contribution to thwarting this anti-Republican conspiracy earned him the distinguished status of “father of the homeland.” In his famous oration against the conspirator, he berates his opponent:

Should your parents dread and hate you, and be obstinate to all your endeavors to appease them, you would doubtless withdraw somewhere from their sight. But now the country, the common parents of us all, hates and dreads you and has long regarded you as a parricide, intent upon the design of destroying her. And will you neither respect her authority, submit to her advice, nor stand in awe of her power?²¹

In the end, this highly acclaimed orator, known for his rhetorical acuity, lost his life in the events that led to the decline and demise of the republican structure that was so dear to his heart. Shortly before his death, however, he put down in writing his unswerving views on the homeland in a Socratic-style dialogue echoed in many writings that appeared in Western Europe on the eve of the modern era. Cicero’s well-known Treatise on the Laws considers the common association between homeland and republic in a dualistic formulation:

I should say, that Cato [a well-known Roman statesman], and municipal citizens like him, have two countries, one, that of their birth, and the other, that of their choice . . . In the same way, we may justly entitle as our country, both the place from where we originated, and that to which we have been associated. It is necessary, however, that we should attach ourselves by a preference of affection to the latter, which, under the name of the Commonwealth, is the common country of us all. For this country it is, that we ought to sacrifice our lives; it is to her that we ought to devote ourselves without reserve; and it is for her that we ought to risk and hazard all our riches and our hopes. Yet this universal patriotism does not prohibit us from preserving a very tender affection for the native soil that was the cradle of our infancy and our youth.²²

Like devotion to the Hellenic polis, loyalty to the Roman Republic was a supreme value, an extolled attribute transcending even nostalgia for one’s birthplace and the landscapes of childhood, inasmuch as it was the republic where one was his own sovereign, an equal partner in the ruling collective. Here an army of civilian volunteers, as distinct from a paid army, could be mobilized; here an individual could be required to die for the place. It was considered justified to be asked to sacrifice oneself for the sake of the public, as the public was the manifestation of one’s own sovereignty. As has already been stated, this conception of political homeland, which would remain unique in the premodern world, resembles the homeland of the modern nationalist era.

Indeed, many enlightened intellectuals of the eighteenth century were enchanted by the patriotic declarations they retrieved from the ancient Mediterranean world, and regarded them as evidence of an ideal regime of liberty, a realm without tyrants or kings. Nevertheless, one of these thinkers, the Neapolitan philosopher and historian Giambattista Vico, reminded his readers that Roman nobles “did not hesitate for the safety of their various fatherlands, to consecrate themselves and their families the will of the laws, which by maintaining the common security of the fatherland kept secure for each of them a certain private monarchical reign over his family.”²³ Vico also did not refrain from criticizing his own Latin forefathers, noting that “the true fatherland was the interest of a few fathers . . .”²⁴

Cicero’s Republican homeland was indeed an oligarchy, consisting of a limited body of civilians, with the electorate and the elected always belonging to the same small elite. Most important for our discussion of the concept of homeland is the fact that only those who were physically present in the Roman capital were eligible to take part in elections. Citizens residing outside the limits of the city itself were stripped both of the right to vote and the right to be elected. And because in Cicero’s time most citizens were already living outside the city, they were ineligible to play an active role in their beloved homeland.

The expansion and growing power of imperial Rome divested it of its connection to the civil homeland. In a number of ways, the empire was a great league of many city-states that each lacked any real practical independence. The third century CE transformation of the empire’s nonslave inhabitants into citizens who lacked the right to participate in the shaping of sovereignty obscured even further the emotional and political connections to the republic homeland. By this means, it facilitated the consolidation and dissemination of a universal monotheism—with ties to specific holy places—that would come to be based on different psychological mechanisms and different intellectual associations.

The founders of the Christian Church would attempt to shift this loyalty from the republican homeland to the heavenly kingdom. As all people are equal before God, the old devotion to the Greek polis and the Roman Republic of slave owners would ostensibly be replaced by devotion to the eternal life that would follow life in this world. As early as Augustine, we see expression of the idea that citizenship, in the true and pure sense of the word, could be found only in the city of God. If it was appropriate to die for the homeland, its appropriateness derived from being a sacrifice by a faithful believer in God’s heavenly kingdom.²⁵ This approach to love for the patria aeterna would reverberate throughout large circles within the Church and serve as a central foundation of Christian faith.

The civilian armies of the Roman Republic disappeared with the expansion of the empire; mercenaries carried the flag of Rome not only throughout the Mediterranean basin but deep into conquered Europe. This historic encounter triggered change on the dormant wooded continent, although the weakness and disintegration of the empire is what ultimately freed the European tribes and localities from the Roman yoke. Only then do we see the beginning of the long, gradual process that concluded in the creation of a new civilization with a completely different structure of social relations. Emergent European feudalism had no citizens, invited no heroic patriotic death, and produced no loyalty to a political-territorial homeland. Nonetheless, elements of the Mediterranean conceptual world trickled into the culture and languages of Europe via a variety of channels, primarily through the works and the increasing power of the Christian Church.

As effectively described by Ernst Kantorowicz in The King’s Two Bodies, the Athenian and Roman Republican concept of homeland faded away completely in societies in which loyalty and personal dependence were hegemonic.²⁶ Although patria became a commonly used word, it was typically employed to refer to a person’s place of birth or residence. “Homeland” became synonymous with the concept of “little country”—pays in the French dialects and heimat in the German dialects—the region in which one’s home was located, in which children were born and raised, and in which the extended family continued to live.

Kings and princes employed the term differently. Elite segments of society applied the concept to a variety of political entities, turning kingdoms, dukedoms, earldoms, and jurisdictions of taxation and judicial activity into “homelands.” The papacy also did not refrain from making use of it, periodically calling for the rescue of the home-land in order to defend Christian harmony and the security of all the faithful.

Typically, the willingness of knights to die was a sacrifice on behalf of either the feudal lord, the Church, or, later, the king and kingdom. The formula pro rege et patria (for king and country) grew increasingly popular in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and would survive until the modern revolutions. But even in the more organized kingdoms, there was a persistent tension between loyalty to the heavenly homeland and loyalty to the national identities that were always subordinated to hierarchical structures. In addition, the military ethos of premodern European societies encompassed devotion to the homeland in the form of substantive values such as honor, glory, and appropriate financial remuneration for one’s willingness to sacrifice.

The slow decline of feudal society and upheavals within the Church also resulted in reinvigoration of the beleaguered concept of patria. The gradual rise of the medieval city, not only as a commercial and financial center but as an active force in the regional division of labor, caused many in Western Europe to regard it as their primary homeland. According to Fernand Braudel, these cities were the site of crystallization of a primal form of nascent patriotism that informed later national consciousness.²⁷

At the same time, Renaissance society’s fondness for the classical tradition of the Mediterranean resulted in another widespread, albeit unoriginal, invocation of the ancient “homeland,” as various humanists attempted to apply the concept to the new city-states that emerged as oligarchic republics.²⁸ At an extraordinarily prophetic moment in history, Machiavelli was even enticed to apply it to the entire Italian peninsula.²⁹ Nowhere at this point, however, did the idea of homeland reverberate the way it had in ancient Athens or the Roman Republic, not to mention in the territorial contexts of the later nation-states.

Nor were the evolving absolutist monarchies capable of producing the expressions of loyalty and the willingness to sacrifice for the sake of the homeland that would become familiar after these monarchies’ demise in the late modern period. For example, let us consider Montesquieu and Voltaire. These eighteenth-century thinkers clearly understood why kingdoms were not perceived as homelands, and explained it to their readers. In his 1748 work The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu, who possessed broad historical knowledge, asserted:

The state continues to exist independently of love of the homeland, desire for true glory, self-renunciation, sacrifice of one’s dearest interests, and all those heroic virtues we find in the ancients and know only by hearsay.³⁰

Voltaire, whose historical knowledge was as broad as that of Montesquieu, addressed the value of “homeland” in his witty Philosophical Dictionary of 1764:

A fatherland is a composite of several families; and as we usually stand by our family out of self-love when we have no conflicting interest, so because of the same self-love we support our town or village which we call our fatherland. The bigger the fatherland the less we love it, because divided love is weaker. It is impossible to love tenderly too numerous a family which we hardly know.³¹

In fact, though incisive in their analyses, both thinkers were firmly rooted in an era on the verge of vanishing. They were quite familiar with the term’s application to the relationship between people and their places of birth and the areas in which they grew up, but had no way of knowing that this array of personal mental connections would be transformed and transferred to broad political structures. The monarchies established on the eve of the modern era lay the foundation for the rise of nationalism by setting into centrifugal motion the administrative languages that would soon emerge as national languages. Most important for our discussion here is the fact that, though lacking the territorial sensitivities that would accompany the rise of national democracies, they began to draw what, in some cases, would become the future borders of the homeland.

Both Montesquieu and Voltaire were liberal pioneers and consistent and courageous advocates of human freedoms. However, both men also exhibited a clearly antidemocratic temperament; they had no interest in the illiterate masses as political subjects and thus were incapable of imagining mass collective identification with a kingdom or political homeland.

It is no coincidence that the first theoretical patriot to emerge from the European Enlightenment was in many ways also its first anti–liberal democrat. Jean-Jacques Rousseau did not address the concept of homeland in a systematic manner and found it virtually unnecessary to clarify his intended meaning when he made use of the term, as he did abundantly. However, some of his writings contain explicit exhortations to preserve patriotic values, employing rhetoric more characteristic of modern statesmen than of eighteenth-century philosophers.

In his moving “Dedication to the Republic of Geneva,” which he wrote in 1754 and used as an introduction to the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality between Men, he already explains the kind of homeland he would prefer if afforded the ability to choose one for himself:

I would have chosen . . . a state where, with all private individuals being known to one another, neither the obscure maneuvers of vice nor the modesty of virtue could be hidden from the notice and the judgment of the public . . . I would therefore have sought for my homeland a happy and tranquil republic, whose antiquity was somehow lost in the dark recesses of time . . . I would have wanted to choose for myself a homeland diverted by a fortunate impotence from the fierce love of conquest . . . I would have searched for a country where the right of legislation was common to all citizens, for who can know better than they the conditions under which it suits them to live together in a single society? . . . And if in addition providence had joined to it a charming location, a temperate climate, a fertile country and the most delightful appearance there is under the heavens, to complete my happiness I would have desired only to enjoy all these goods in the bosom of that happy homeland, living peacefully in sweet society with my fellow citizens.³²

His entire life, Rousseau yearned to see the establishment of sovereign egalitarian societies within defined territories that could serve as natural homelands. At the same time, in his Social Contract, this republican son of Geneva, with his many internal contradictions, did not hesitate to ponder: “How could a man or a people seize a vast territory and keep out the rest of the human race except by a criminal usurpation since the action would rob the rest of mankind of the shelter and food that nature has given them all in common?”³³

Despite these ethical and “anarchistic” declarations, Rousseau remained a completely political thinker. His egalitarian conception of man and the universalist perspective on which it was based led him to search for freedom, which was always dear to his heart, only in the realm of politics: that is, in the construction of political community. Yet the father of the idea of modern democracy also maintained that the freedom he sought could be realized only in small units, or, more precisely, in the form of direct democracies. For this reason, the ideal homeland, according to Rousseau’s basic theory, must remain small and tangible.³⁴ A prophet waiting for the gates of the nationalist era to open, Rousseau watched keenly from his great height and distance but remained unable to enter.

TERRITORIALIZATION OF THE NATIONAL ENTITY

Patriotic battle cries could be heard during the Low Countries’ revolt against the Spanish kingdom in the late sixteenth century and even more so in the early seventeenth century. During the English revolution of the mid-sixteenth century, the radical wing of the Levellers identified the homeland with the free community, which was fully mobilized against monarchic tyranny. And if at the outset of the American Revolution the rebels regarded Britain as their motherland, their attitude had changed by its conclusion, when a new conception of patriotism began to percolate among them. “The land of the free and the home of the brave”³⁵ was on its way, soon to make its mark on history.

One of the most important milestones in the new and promising career of the homeland in the modern era was undoubtedly the French Revolution, particularly its Republican phase. If until then the concept of homeland had served as a point of reference for the political and intellectual elite—state officials, ambassadors, scholars, poets, philosophers, and the like—it now strode confidently into the alleyways of the people. For example, “La Marseillaise,” composed by a junior officer from Alsace, became a popular refrain sung by the large revolutionary battalion that arrived in Marseille and was quickly learned by many more. “Franche-Comté, children of the fatherland, the day of glory has arrived! Against us stands tyranny,” sang the volunteer fighters as they marched, trembling, to the battle of Valmy in September 1792 to fight the hired armies of the old world. And those who were not wounded by the salvo of cannon fire were even able to finish the words to the song: “Sacred love of the fatherland, support our avenging arms. Liberty, cherished liberty, fight with thy defenders!” For good reason, the song was later adopted as France’s national anthem.³⁶

In the meantime, however, Napoleon’s conquests were arousing a new wave of patriotic demands outside France, in areas such as the future territories of Germany and Italy. One by one, the seeds of patriotism were planted, soon to transform old Europe into a spectacular garden of nations and, thus, of homelands.

From the stormy 1790s in France to the popular uprisings that rocked the Arab world at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, almost all revolutionaries and rebels have pledged their love to liberty and, at the same time, declared their loyalty to homeland. The homeland would reemerge on a large scale in the European Spring of Nations of 1848 and would also unite the rebels of the Paris Commune of 1871. And although the Russian Revolution took pride in its internationalism, when put to the test during its war of survival against the Nazi invasion, the Soviet Union revived patriotism as an effective ideological mechanism for mass mobilization. The two world wars of the twentieth century were brutal conflicts fought in the name of a guiding superideology that regarded the state as the entity responsible for protecting the homeland, or at least attempting to work for its benefit by expanding its borders. As we have seen, the acquisition of territory was regarded as a major aim of the nationalist struggles in the great campaigns for decolonization that swept the world from the 1940s to the 1970s. Both the socialists and the communists of the Third World were first and foremost patriots, and only later focused on distinctions of sociopolitical affiliation.

The major question that still needs to be answered is how deep emotion toward a small and familiar physical place was translated into a conceptual composite, applied to vast territories that humans could never know firsthand in their entirety. Perhaps the answer lies in the slow yet decisive territorialization of politics in the age of nationalism.

Despite their great historical importance, the patriots of the English revolution, the volunteers who sang the “Marseillaise” while marching into battle during the French Revolution, the rebels against Napoleonic occupation, and even the revolutionaries of 1848 in the capital cities of Europe still constituted minorities of the populations in which they conducted their activities—large minorities, but minorities nonetheless. And even if homeland had become a key concept in the restless capital cities, most people remained tillers of the soil, relatively untroubled by the qualities of the political leadership, which was already swaying to the cultural and linguistic tones of modernity.

What beckoned them into the new homeland or, perhaps more accurately, what began to construct the concept of national territory in their consciousness was the legislation emanating from the political centers and applied throughout the territories. These laws exempted significant numbers of farmers from feudal obligations, taxes, and other burdens, and in some cases also provided decisive recognition of their ownership to the land they cultivated. The new land laws and agrarian reforms served as the primary means for the transformation of dynastic monarchies and large principalities into increasingly stable nation-states and, as a result, for the evolution of multidimensional homeland areas.

The great urbanization that was responsible for much social change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and for the detachment of the masses from their “small homelands,” constituted another important precondition for enabling many to come to terms, at least conceptually, with a large, unfamiliar national territory. Mobility gave rise to hitherto unknown variations of the need for social belonging, and this need was met by national identity, which offered the enticing promise of facilitating individual and collective adherence and rootedness within a larger geographic area.

These and many other political, legal, and social processes were only the starting gun or, rather, the invitation. The invitees still had a long and exhausting road to travel before finding safe haven in their expansive imagined homelands.

It is important to remember that homelands did not produce nationalism, but rather the opposite: homelands emerged from nationalism. The homeland would prove to be one of the more surprising, and perhaps the most destructive, creations of the modern era. The establishment of nation-states imbued with new meaning the areas under their rule and the borders that delineated them. Through the construction of a deep sense of belonging to a national group, a cultural-political process created Britons, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, and, later, Algerians, Thais, and Vietnamese, from diverse mixtures of local cultures and languages. This process invariably produced an array of emotions related to a defined physical spaces. Landscape became a fundamental component of collective identity, forming the walls, so to speak, of the home in which the evolving nation was being invited to reside. Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul offers a persuasive analysis of this dynamic in his delineation of the evolution of the Siamese nation-state. The “geo-body” of the new nation, he contends, was one condition for its own formation, and it was first and foremost modern mapping that facilitated the creation of this territorial entity.³⁷ It is customary to refer to historians as the first authorized agents of a nation, but this appellation must also be bestowed on the geographers who undertook its mapping. While historiography helped the national state to discipline its primeval past, it was cartography that helped it actualize its imagination and its power over its territory.

The material, technological precondition for the expansion of territorial imagination was the slow development and spread of mass communications. Political and cultural factors completed the process by creating effective state vehicles for the formulation and dissemination of ideology. From the printing revolution of the fifteenth century—which grew increasingly sophisticated as it evolved into comprehensive and invasive multi-channel media—to the opening of schools and the advent of compulsory education during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the relationship between elite culture and popular culture changed completely, as did the relationship between the cultures of the urban centers and the rural periphery. If not for printing, the kingdoms’ maps and the geographers’ increasingly sophisticated diagrams of the physical world would have been seen by very few. If not for the provision of public education for all, only a small number of people would have known and been able to identify the borders of their own countries. Mapmaking and education became a natural, integrated complex that served to carve out a defined, familiar space. For this reason, maps that propagate and inculcate the borders of the homeland deep within the consciousness of every student still adorn the walls of today’s classrooms. Often beside these maps hang large pictures of the landscapes of the home-land’s different regions. Such reproductions and photographs feature valleys, mountains, and villages, but never urban settings.³⁸ Nearly always, the visual representation of the homeland is accompanied by a touch of romantic longing for an ancient rootedness in the land.

As part of the intensive nationalization of the masses, imbuing the population with a love for the homeland naturally depended on knowledge of its geography. And just as physical cartography enabled humans to conquer the earth and acquire its many treasures, political mapping helped states to capture the hearts of its citizens. As we have already seen, alongside the history lessons concerning the national entity’s past, geography lessons established and sculpted its territorial embodiment. By these means, the national entity was simultaneously being imagined and shaped in both time and space.

Among the results of this was the complicated relationship between the laws of compulsory education and the laws of compulsory military conscription. Previously, in order to defend the territory under their control or to appropriate the territory of others, kingdoms had been forced to hire armies who had no knowledge of the territory and borders of the kingdoms that hired them—a problem gradually resolved for the modern nation-states by compulsory military conscription, based on the willing agreement of most citizens to serve in the armies of their respective states as long as a defined territory stood at their disposal. Thus, modern wars grew longer and increasingly “total” in nature, and, as a result, the number of lives thereby taken increased exponentially. In the new global world, willingness to die for the homeland, which in the ancient Mediterranean world had been the privilege of the few, now became the entitlement—and obligation—of all.

However, we would be mistaken to conclude that so many people were transformed into sworn patriots solely as a result of indoctrination or the manipulations of modern ruling elites. Had it not been for the systematic mechanical reproduction achieved by newspapers, books, and, later, radio broadcasts and cinema newsreels, and for the intensive pedagogic formation of a general system of compulsory state education, citizens would have remained much less aware of the role of national space in their lives. In order to identify their home-land, people had to know how to read and write and had to consume healthy servings of the extensive buffet known as “national culture.” We can therefore conclude that as ideological mechanisms of the state, the new schools and the new communications media were directly responsible for the systematic creation of homelands and patriots.

Still, the primary reason for the broad consensus regarding the obligation of mass sacrifice for the sake of the people and the land on which it lived was the remarkable process of democratization that began in the late eighteenth century and spread across the globe. Throughout history, empires, kingdoms, and principalities had belonged to individuals; the Greek polis and the Roman Republic were controlled by the few. The modern state, whether liberal democratic or authoritarian democratic, was now supposed to be subject to the formal authority of all its citizens. Beginning at a defined age, all inhabitants were to hold citizenship and therefore be, in principle, the state’s sovereign and legal rulers. The civil body’s collective ownership of the state also meant collective ownership of its territorial space.³⁹

As we know, the emergence of the modern state, with its criminal code and its civil-legal system, was one of the first conditions for the establishment of bourgeois property. The legitimization of private property within the modern state was stabilized and reinforced by the democratization and sovereignty gaining ground within it. In other words, society’s abstract sense of collective ownership of the land within its state borders also served indirectly to reinforce recognition of the capital amassed by wealthy members of society, and the thriving of capital was not facilitated solely by the state’s monopoly over violence but also by its absolute control over all its territory.

In this sense, territory is the common property of all shareholders in the nationalist enterprise. Even the completely destitute have something that belongs to them, and small property owners are still masters of the great national assets. This conception of collective ownership engenders a sense of satisfaction and security with which no political utopia or promise for the future can compete. This dynamic, which escaped most socialists and anarchists of the nineteenth century, proved itself during the twentieth century. Workers, clerks, artisans, and farmers marched together during the bloody nationalist conflicts, motivated by the political imagination that they were fighting for the homeland beneath their feet, which strengthened their steadfastness, as well as for a state whose leaders were their official representatives. These democratic representatives were charged with administering the property of the masses—that is, with defending the territory without which the state could not survive.

This leads us to one source of the strong collective sentiments that would roil and inflame national modernity. When Samuel Johnson declared in the late eighteenth century that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel,” he accurately foresaw the sort of political rhetoric that would dominate for the next two centuries: whoever could present himself as the most loyal watchdog of national property would become the uncrowned king of modern democracy.

Just as all property has its legal limits, every national space is bounded by borders now subject to international law. However, whereas it is possible to quantify 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 borders become the 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.

10 See especially Konrad Lorenz’s famous book On Aggression, London: Methuen, 1967.

11 On this subject, see John Hurrell Crook, “The Nature and function of territorial aggression,” in Montagu (ed.), Man and Aggression, 183–217.

12 Examples include Gaia, the primordial earth goddess of Greek mythology, and the Canaanite goddess Asherah.

13 For example, see Homer, The Iliad, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007, 5.212; 9.41, 46.

14 Aeschylus, The Persians, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981, 59. Herodotus’ The History also makes sparing use of the term, primarily to indicate place of origin. See, for example, Herodotus, The History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 3.140, 4.76.

15 See, for example, Sophocles, Antigone, ll. 183, 200. and Euripides, Medea, ll. 34, 797ff.

16 Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, 6.69.

17 Ibid., 2.34–46. The Stoic school sometimes employed the term “homeland” to refer to the entire cosmos. In addition, although Greece was never recognized as a homeland, some educated Hellenes possessed a consciousness of shared cultural identity that stemmed from “shared blood” or linguistic and ritual similarity. For example, see Herodotus, The Histories, 8.144, and the famous words of Isocrates in Panegyricus 50.

18 Plato, The Trial and Death of Socrates: Four Dialogues, trans. Benjamin Jowett, New York: Dover Publications, 1992, 51.

19 On the complex relationship between autochthonism and politics in Athens, see the articles in Nicole Loraux’s fascinating book Né de la terre. Mythe et politique à Athènes, Paris: Seuil, 1996, and also Marcel Detienne, Comment être autochtone, Paris: Seuil, 2003, 19–59. On the Spartans’ startling concept of space and their unique attitude toward ancestral land, see Irad Malkin, Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

20 Gaius Sallustius Crispus, The Catiline Conspiracy, 58.

21 Cicero, The Catiline Conspiracy, Oration 4.7, in William Duncan, Cicero’s Select Orations Translated into English, London: Printed for G. G. J. and J. Robinson and J. Evans, 1792, 127.

22 Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Political Works of Marcus Tullius Cicero, London: Edmund Spettigue, 1841, 78–9.

23 Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch (eds.), The New Science of Giambattista Vico, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984, 23–4.

24 Ibid., 255.

25 See Augustine’s discussion in The City of God, 5.16, 17.

26 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981, 233–4. See also Kantorowicz’s brilliant article “Pro Patria Mori in Medieval Political Thought,” American Historical Review 56:3 (1951), 472–92.

27 Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life 1400–1800, Glasgow: Collins, 1973, 399.

28 On the people of the Renaissance period, see Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, 24–40.

29 Niccolò Machiavelli, “An Appeal to Take Back Italy and Liberate Her from the Barbarians,” The Prince, Wellesley: Dante University Press, 2003, 131–4. Despite this chapter and a few other comments in his other writings, it would be an exaggeration to portray Machiavelli as a patriotic idealizer of Italy, as does William J. Langdon in Politics, Patriotism and Language, New York: Peter Lang, 2005.

30 Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 25.

31 François Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, New York: Penguin Classics, 2004, 327.

32 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1992, 2–5.

33 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract 1.9, New York: Penguin Classics, 1968, 67.

34 True to form, in his advice to the sizable Polish confederation, Rousseau also articulated a contradictory view: to implement aggressive patriotic policies, including indoctrination of the masses. See, for example, Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne (1771), Paris: Flammarion, 1990, 172–4.

35 Excerpt from the lyrics of the patriotic US song “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which was written in 1814 and became the national anthem of the United States in 1931.

36 On the patriotic awakening during the Revolution, see Philippe Contamine, “Mourir pour la Patrie: Xe–XXe siècle,” in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire II, La Nation, Paris: Gallimard, 1986, 35–7.

37 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.

38 Paul Gilbert, The Philosophy of Nationalism, Boulder: Westview Press, 1998, 97.

39 For one of the first discussions of the relationship between sovereignty and territory, see Jean Gottman’s fascinating but ahistorical work The Significance of Territory, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973.

40 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (edited by Colin Gordon), New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, 68.

41 Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

42 Ibid., 6–7, 191–2.

43 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1996, 19.

44 On the difference between borders and frontier areas, see J. R. V. Prescott, Political Frontiers and Boundaries, London: Unwin Hyman, 1987, 12–51.

45 For a discussion of this subject based on a completely different theoretical approach, see Anthony D. Smith, “Nation and Ethnoscape,” in Myths and Memories of the Nation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 149–59.