geographic thought and these modes of thought
raised the territorial ideal of sovereignty to new
heights. Building strong, competitive nation-
states resulted in the control over bounded
territories.
Political boundaries are always expressions of
geo-power, the use of geographical knowledge in
the governance and management of territories
(Ó’Tuathail, 1996). Geographers and their ideas
of boundaries have been exploited in many states
by power holding elites, both in the demarcation
of concrete boundaries and in more abstract ways
in the creation of geopolitical visions and identi-
ties. Geographical (and historical) knowledge
that is used in giving names and boundaries to
regions and territories is instrumental in the
demarcation and control of territories. No wonder
then that ‘the boundary’ became immediately
one of the key categories in political geography.
The so-called ‘father of political geography’,
Friedrich Ratzel, greatly influenced thinking
about boundaries with his notion that states are
organisms and that the boundaries of a state are
its peripheral organs that can and should be
expanded as stronger states grow at the expense
of weaker ones. More than acknowledging that
borders are never static, Ratzel’s ideas were justifi-
cationsfor imperialism and state adventurism. In
his organismic thinking all dynamic states try to
expand their spatial extent and extension.
Many of the ideas Ratzel championed were
already significant. Particularly influential was
the French concept of les limites naturelles,
according to which every state has ‘natural
boundaries’ which that state should pursue until
it has obtained. As might be expected, adjacent
states argued about where their ‘natural bound-
aries’ existed – the very disagreement undermining
the notion that there really were ‘natural bound-
aries’! Nevertheless, this idea was particularly
influential in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. In most cases, historical arguments
were used to justify the ‘natural boundary of the
state’, though arguments frequently evoked a
higher authority like God or natural law in order
to justify particular claims (Pounds, 1954).
Natural boundaries were seen as the only real
borders because they emerged from nature –
whether being God-given or not. The boundaries
drawn by people were regarded as arbitrary. Yet
the arbitrariness of even ‘obvious’ natural
boundaries was not acknowledged. Mountains,
after all, can be seen as ‘natural communities’,
rivers as organically connected regions and seas
as transportation highways rather than as ‘natural
limits’.
Political geographers have paid increasing
attention to the meanings attached to borderlandscapes since the 1990s (Rumley and Minghi,
1991). They also became interested in the
processes of inclusion and exclusion: how
boundaries are used in the construction of com-
munities, territorial identities and representations
of ‘us’ and the Other in the ‘purification of space’,
i.e. in the construction of images of culturally
homogeneous territorial groups (Sibley, 1995).
The social and discursive construction of bound-
aries has been typically studied on a national
or subnational scale (Falah and Newman, 1995;
Paasi, 1996; Radcliffe and Westwood, 1996),
while geopolitical oppositions have been
analysed on larger spatial scales (Newman, 1999;
Ó’Tuathail, 1996). These studies have shown that
the purification of space, the rejection of differ-
ence, the securing of boundaries and symbols to
maintain solidarity in social communities are
employed in the exclusion and inclusion of social
groupings at all spatial scales, varying from the
territories of local gangs in large cities to nations
and global geopolitical spaces (Newman and
Paasi, 1998).BOUNDARIES AND THE NATION:
NATION-STATES OR
MULTINATIONAL STATES?New interest in the cultural significance of politi-
cal boundaries emerges from the observation that
boundaries are not merely technical instruments
exploited by the state but also constituents of
(national) identity and the media of power that
are used in the ‘naturalization’ of nations as
individuals, i.e. they are major elements in the
making of the territorial trap. Most theorists of
nationalism note the significance of territory and
boundaries in the construction of national com-
munities and the images of their past, present and
future. For some authors nationalism is a process
of border maintenance and creation (Conversi,
1995) while others argue more generally that
human consciousness and social organization
are conditioned by territory and boundaries
(M. Anderson, 1996). Nationalism promoted by
the state exploits both history and territoriality to
make this boundedness appear natural. The
history of boundaries is a major component in
the geopolitical imagination of most states
(Radcliffe and Westwood, 1996: 57). History
and territoriality are used in both the construction
and the reproduction of the territory and citizens,
the latter understood – or state institutions tend-
ing to represent them – as constituting ‘the
nation’. The nation is not only a political unit but466 GEOPOLITICAL CULTURES3029-ch24.qxd 03-10-02 11:03 AM Page 466