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Redrawing Borders

Time to reconfigure the world?

In the '10 Ideas for the next 10 Years' column in Time magazine's 22 March issue, some bold ideas with regard to the coming decade are introduced. What caught my eye, while I was reading this in India, was this article by Parag Khanna titled 'Remapping the World'. It reminded me a lot of my H3 Geopolitics course in NUS when I took it in 2008, the concept of borders and their wider consequences beyond geopolitics. Quite bold and outrageous yet impossible as well; it could have well-meaning consequences but things can turn equally disastrous.

Essentially, Khanna suggests redrawing a new map of the world to reduce conflict and reverse the damage of poorly-drawn borders. Regions and nations with different cultures are haphazardly pieced together, often remnants of colonial rule where colonial masters did not give regard to cultural composition in the drawing up of borders. Borders are, after all, an arbitrary line drawn that demarcates where a country's jurisdiction ends and where another country's begin. A state is contained within its borders, but a nation need not be contained within these borders. The difference between a nation and a state is that people identify with a nation because of language, cultural or historical belonging, whereas a state can be formed devoid of cultural identity. Examples of states that encompass nations (with poorly-drawn borders) include Iraq (the Kurds are divided by the Iraq-Turkey border, leading to Kurds being the minority in an Arab nation), Sudan and Nigeria (Muslim-Christian divide).

So where borders are poorly drawn, should we press the Reset button and allow remapping and regrouping? Despite all the benefits (such as creating cultural unity and reducing conflict as a result of disharmony) this can be very messy as there could be new tussles over wealth and resources in the process of remapping. How to determine which resource goes to which state, should borders be redrawn? How to accurately determine the proportion of people of a certain race or religion in an area, and hence decide which country to belong to? Wars between and within countries can result. A vivid example of how drawing new boundaries by religion may fail: the 1947 partition of India into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. While well-intentioned, the act was controversial and resulted in a bloody war that led to the seperation of East Pakistan as Bangladesh and the unresolved dispute of Jammu and Kashmir. And the Muslim minority in India today tend to be disadvantaged and of impoverished upbringing compared to their Hindu peers in India or even with their fellow Muslims in Pakistan.

Borders need not be added, according to Khanna. They could even be erased or neglected, such as in the case of the EU whereby 27 countries came together to join an economic and trading bloc. This would then contradict the idea of having more borders to demarcate the jurisdiction of various nations and peoples. While an amalgamation of small nations could allow them to punch above their weight in the global arena, problems of power-sharing could arise. People have suggested, and continue to suggest, that Singapore merge back into the fold of Malaysia to tap into the greater hinterland, and given that the culture and history of Malaysia and Singapore have been similar. Perhaps a merger today might be more palatable compared to in the 1960s and 1970s, post-Merger and Seperation when people were fighting valiantly for Singapore's independence and sustenance in the global arena. But whether it would be beneficial economically, socially and politically, for both Malaysians and Singaporeans, remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, forces of globalisation are actually the true powers that transcend borders: the development of transportation (from railways and ships to airplanes) as well as the Internet. These forces allow the negating of borders, and this is perhaps what citizens of various nations and states need to tap into for their survival in the future, while keeping in mind that the borders created in the yesteryear are unlikely to go away anytime soon given the territorial nature of Man.