Review: Group Chat Meme

tl;dr: To endorse the concept that European borders are to blame for developing world conflict is to endorse problematic concepts of nationalism, to ignore millenia long legacies, and to ultimately delegitimize BIPOC as controllers of their own destiny. 

 A friend recently shared the following /r/historymemes meme in a groupchat:

I think it’s a fundamentally problematic concept. The people on /r/historymemes straightforwardly agree, with many of the top comments pointing out that it isn’t very true. I’d go a step forward: it’s actually very problematic.

National-determinism is Genocidal Ideology

I should be clear I don't want to not blame the Europeans. As an American, I’m anti-imperialist by birth. I just don't think their maps are the primary cause of continued post-imperialism violence in the Middle East (or even more broadly the developing world). 

To focus on whether or not a country captures a nationality is to fall into the post-World War One trap: nation-states are real things that should contain their "f/volks".  This is a pretty repudiated concept! It led to the rise of the Nazis, and is the powering propaganda force behind Russian revanchism. Nations, ethnicities, languages... these are not the fundamental units of political activity, and we shouldn't encourage them to be political units of activity.

"European maps are the problem!" has a solution- only one!- global ethnic cleansing. Borders have always been extremely messy, with different population variations tending to be spaced out like a spotty spectrum. To say, "The British should've made a Christian Nigeria and a Muslim Nigeria" or "Iraq should be split into a Shia and a Sunni section" is to say "Lets take the Partition of the British Raj, and apply it to the entire planet."

I feel like there are a many million people with the trauma that points in the other direction!

Borders are made up, but its even worse than you think

You see a lot of maps like these of Africa and North America and Australia, which kind of engage in this alt-timeline idea of "What would these continents look like if the Europeans didn't touch them? Wouldn't it have been fantastic if these countries had been allowed to develop and grow?"

Of course, if I show you the Indian or European equivalent, you balk:

India ~1500AD

Europa Universalis 4 starting map

We balk because tiny political state with little governmental capacity does not make a desirable modern state! (maybe!) Would it be great to go back in time and make sure that Europe never formed its nation-states? Would it be fantastic for the various Indian princely states to develop and grow without the federal government? Maybe! If we’re okay with high levels of local violence and local poverty. 

Border-Theory centers European agency, and treats BIPOCs like NPCs

Looking at specific borders can help us make sense of this: Reidar Visser points out that the Sykes-Picot Agreement was not just an imposed agreement, but a response to on-the-ground realities:

 Sometimes Sykes-Picot is being construed as a complete armchair project by willful European strategists. What is often not realized is the extent to which the agreement merely put on the map patterns of special administrative arrangements that had been in the making under the Ottomans for decades, if not longer. Thus, special Ottoman arrangements for Palestine and Lebanon date back to the nineteenth century: the special administrative district of Lebanon dating to 1861 and the special district of Jerusalem established in the 1870s. As for Iraq, it had been separated entirely from Syria in administrative terms almost since the beginning of Islam – and had for long periods been ruled from Baghdad as a single charge. Again, the only real exception pertains to the Raqqa-Ana borderlands which in brief intervals had gravitated towards Baghdad rather than Damascus.

Emphasis mine.

This pattern of Europeans lazily following local existing administrative differences or going along with whatever locals wanted repeats itself time and time again. India and Pakistan were driven by local differences between people that wanted a Muslim state and people that wanted a Hindu state. African states accepted European borders because they wanted to avoid these conflicts. 

Note:! African states accepted these borders. India and Pakistan wanted a division. Yet, if you accept the "Euro line drawers did it" theory of conflict, you completely ignore the volition of these BIPOC leaders. Razib Khan points this out,

a postcolonial narrative that foregrounds the agency and action of Europeans may not be fully informative. The period between 1400 and 1800 is one where Europe became progressively more dynamic and powerful vis-a-vis other regions of the oikoumene, but until the very end of this period European powers were often marginal players except in their own imaginations.

After 1800 European hegemony truly took hold, as the Eurasian “gunpowder empires” collapsed, and the interior of Africa was finally opened up to colonization due to quinone. The question then becomes: does this century or so allow us to understand by and large the course of future history?

Emphasis his.

When we imagine a future utopian world, we don't -and shouldn't- imagine a world where borders are affixed to the random chances of population flux from five hundred years ago. We should hope that the future's locus of control is strictly in their present and not lodged with us, or worse, with our white, racist grandparents. 

(Epistemic status: Continues my anti-Eurocentrism approach to histrionics)