The Cognitive Geometry of War
Barry Smith
Department of Philosophy and Center for Cognitive Science, SUNY
Buffalo
phismith@acsu.buffalo.edu
From: Peter Koller and Klaus Puhl (eds.),
Current Issues in Political Philosophy,
Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1997, 394–403.
Abstract
When national borders in the modern sense first began to be established
in early modern Europe, non-contiguous and perforated nations were a commonplace.
According to the conception of the shapes of nations that is currently
preferred, however, nations must conform to the topological model of (approximate)
circularity; their borders must guarantee contiguity and simple connectedness,
and such borders must as far as possible conform to existing topographical
features on the ground. The striving to conform to this model can be seen
at work today in Quebec and in Ireland, it underpins much of the rhetoric
of the P.L.O., and was certainly to some degree involved as a motivating
factor in much of the ethnic cleansing which took place in Bosnia in recent
times.
The question to be addressed in what follows is:
to what extent could inter-group disputes be more peacefully resolved,
and ethnic cleansing avoided, if political leaders, diplomats and others
involved in the resolution of such disputes could be brought to accept
weaker geometrical constraints on the shapes of nations? A number of associated
questions then present themselves: What sorts of administrative and logistical
problems have been encountered by existing non contiguous nations (such
as the United States) and by perforated nations (such as Italy, which circumcludes
the Vatican and the Republic of San Marino, and South Africa, which circumcludes
Lesotho), and by other nations deviating in different ways from the received
geometrical ideal? To what degree is the desire for continuity and simple
connectedness a rational desire (based for example on well-founded military
or economic considerations), and to what degree does it rest on species
of political rhetoric which might be countered by, for example, philosophical
argument? These and a series of related questions will form the subject-matter
of the present essay.
Introduction
There are different types of spatial shadows cast by human activities.
There is first of all that sort of spatial shadow which is present in the
phenomenon which psychologists call 'personal space', a phenomenon illustrated
by the behavior of persons at a party, or at a political meeting, or in
a queue, who can be observed to adjust their relative positions in order
to preserve a certain proper distance from their neighbors. Individuals
engaged in such activities can be conceived as contained within spatial
bubbles which move with the individuals involved. Such spatial bubbles
vary in size, shape and degree of elasticity in reflection of the type
and degree of physical separation from other participant individuals that
is required by the given activity. The geometry of such personal spaces
will differ also as a function of the type (age, social origin, gender,
etc.) of the individuals involved (Leibman 1970).
Small groups, too, may have their own personal spaces
in this sense, for example on the dance floor. Consider what happens when
one stranger says to another 'Shall we dance?' and is greeted with acceptance.
Here a plural subject of a new kind is formed, a civil society in microcosm,
which has its own personal space of a certain shape, size and elasticity
(depending on step, rhythm and culture) and which moves around the dance
floor in such a way as to be marked by a certain more or less tacit resistance
to penetration or separation in relation to other couples.
A different sort of spatial shadow is illustrated in the phenomenon
of territoriality, a type of relation between an individual or group and
an area of space which is of such a sort that the former will seek to defend
the latter against invasion by other individuals or groups. The phenomenon
of territoriality involves in each case a relation to some specific portion
of space. A territory is 'a fixed area from which intruders are excluded
by some combination of advertisement, threat, and attack.' (Brown 1975)
Force Dynamic Spatial Objects
Both territory and personal space are matters of disposition or tendency,
of what would happen if something else happened for
example of the defensive gestures or withdrawal maneuvers which would be
provoked by different sorts of incursions. Exploiting a term coined by
the linguist Leonard Talmy (1988), we will call such dispositionally demarcated
regions force dynamic spatial objects. Their borders, correspondingly,
we shall refer to as force dynamic spatial borders; they are borders
of a peculiar sort, possessed of a certain intrinsic elasticity. It is
because of the dispositional character of force dynamic borders that their
precise locations are hard to establish in any given case. Force dynamic
spatial boundaries may moreover overlap; the resultant areas will then
be marked by the existence of twilight zones subject to the dominion of
no single individual or group.
Force dynamic boundaries may shift very rapidly.
Consider the problem of modern warfare against rebels: during the day,
the army can hold the cities and the road, at night only the cities. This
means that the areas under government control change between night and
day. Force dynamic boundaries depend also on the means of transportation
in relation to which they are determined: if the two groups on both sides
of the border do not use the same technology, the boundary is not well
fixed. The boundary between Venezuela and Brazil in the jungle, for example,
is very different if considered from the perspective of water and road
transport with technical means or from the perspective of the network of
paths of indigenous peoples.
Both territoriality and personal space are standardly
a matter of continuous wholes the image of a single, roughly spherical
bubble, whether stationary or in motion, is thus normally appropriate.
The tendency for individuals and groups to seek to establish for themselves
continuous regions of 'home'-space of more or less circular shape is well-justified:
as Aristotle noted, the roots of politics lie in friendship, and thus in
proximity, and accessibility. Such regions are in addition most easily
defended against incursion from without. Where continuity is broken by
invasion, measures will accordingly be taken to reconstitute continuous
territory.
No 'Territorial Imperative'
Robert Ardrey, notoriously, has propounded in his book The Territorial
Imperative a view according to which a 'hard-wired' terrritorial instinct
applies to phenomena on vastly different scales, including interactions
between nation-sized groups. The territorial instinct is according to Ardrey
able to explain phenomena as diverse as war, national sovereignty and the
workings of the real estate markets, as well as human and animal territorial
defense behaviors of more restricted types. The tendency to territorial
behavior is certainly a well-attested part of our biological heritage.
Anthropologists have shown, however, that the force of territoriality diminishes
with increase in group size and in spatial area, and that, in the case
of both human and non-human animal species, a nested continuum of types
of site must be distinguished. In the first place we have the home range,
that area within which the group spends most of its time (including foraging
and hunting). Within the home range are various core areas, for
example watering holes and other sites where desirable resources are available
on a routine basis. Finally there are territories in the narrow
sense, and it is only in relation to these, characteristically tiny areas
that the occupying individual or group demands exclusive use. (Taylor 1988,
pp. 21f.)
Most anthropologists today, therefore, would argue
that territoriality in the narrow, biological sense applies only to small
(roughly: family-sized) groups. As far as application to larger groups
is concerned, they prefer to speak instead of the much weaker and more
variegated phenomenon of territorial functioning, defined as
an interlocked system of sentiments, cognitions, and behaviors that
are highly place specific, socially and culturally determined and maintaining,
and that represent a class of personplace transactions concerned with
issues of setting management, maintenance, legibility, and expressiveness.
(Taylor 1988, p. 6)
Alternatively, they talk of territoriality not in terms of defence and
exclusive use but rather in terms of 'the attempt by an individual or group
to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships,
by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area [the territory].'
(Sack 1986, p. 19)
The desire for exclusive control over a certain area of
land has, certainly, served as a stimulus to war and intergroup violence
in many cases. But there are many large groups which live for long periods
in territories in which they are interspersed with other groups, and pogroms
do not happen all the time. Indeed, the evidence of history tells us that
many large groups did not act on the basis of any territorial imperative
to seek exclusive occupation of any single continuous area. It is therefore
unlikely that the so-called territorial imperative described by Ardrey
can be exploited in giving an account of the causes of war. Not only are
there successful and long-lasting multicultural and multiethnic societies
involving systematic overlapping and intermixing of distinct groups within
a single region, there are also and indeed far more commonly than
is often presupposed non-contiguous nations (such as the United States)
whose sovereign territory is broken up into separate pieces by the interspersed
territory of other sovereign nations.
Yet some remnants of the desire for exclusive control
remain, and may be latent for long periods even when not expressed in action.
Such remnants are moreover stimulated by, and are reciprocally a pre-condition
for, the forcefulness of certain sorts of rhetorical devices on the parts
of tribal elders, historians, poets and religious leaders. They are illustrated
for example in phrases such as 'manifest destiny', 'from sea to shining
sea', 'Deutschland ist unteilbar!', and so on. Such rhetorical devices
have the power to awaken or reinforce the desire of group members to establish
for themselves exclusive occupation of certain territorial regions, often
regions of certain desired ('natural', broadly circular) shapes, and marked
by correspondingly 'natural' (broadly: topographically determined) frontiers.
Poets favor 'natural' borders. The rhetoricians of the Nazi party were
exploiting this appeal in their talk of 'Lebensraum' and in their
justification of attempts to establish unification of Germany with the
German settlements to the east.
Such rhetorical devices have their equal and opposite counterpart in
phrases such as 'the Palestinian entity', 'the six-county statelet' designed
to diminish the significance of claims to sovereignty on behalf of unfavored
groups. These phrases, too, point to the dimension of geometry as a crucial
but hitherto neglected factor in the aetiology of wars, and to the tendency
on the parts of leaders of national or ethnic groups and of war-propagandists
to claim on behalf of their constituent populations rights to territories
of certain geometrically favored sorts. Correspondingly, leaders of groups
with established territories refer to attempts to dislodge them from control
of even peripheral fragments of these territories as amounting to 'balkanisation',
'dismemberment', 'mutilation', 'violation of the motherland' and the like.
Thus, to take just one example, in March 1996 Russian Defense Minister
General Pavel Grachev referred to Chechnya as 'a testing ground for the
strategic enemies of Russia whose main aim is to split the country
and annex part of its territory.' (Emphasis added.)
Such devices are clearly illustrated also in the
case of Quebec and Ireland, to name just two peculiarly conspicuous examples
of the phenomenon I have in mind. Consider the following passage taken
from the 'Manifesto' issued by the Bishop of Derry in 1916 in response
to the prospect of partition:
Blessed by St. Patrick as a nation the children of Erin have clung
to the national ideal with a tenacity surpassed only by their loyalty to
the Faith that he planted in their breasts. And are the Irishmen of today
going to prove themselves degenerate sons of their great and noble forbears?
Are we going to surrender even without a national protest the inheritance
of a United Ireland handed down to us through the ages of persecution and
bloodshed? Are we so indifferent to the memory of our forefathers as to
allow the last resting place of St. Patrick and St. Bridgid, the spot dearest
on earth to great St. Columbcille, and the Primatial See of Ireland's Father
in the Faith, to be included in a new Pale and cut off from the Fatherland?
In such an event what a mockery it would be to speak any longer of Ireland
a nation! Is not Ireland dearer to us than any little enclave of individuals,
however important and indispensable they may seem to themselves?
Such rhetorical devices have been instrumental, over and over again in
the course of human history since (roughly) the time of the Napoleonic
wars, in instigating 'freedom fighters' to give their lives in the cause
of establishing borders of certain favored shapes. These devices thus certainly
appeal to deep-rooted impulses on the part of the members of those groups
towards whom they are directed. Yet, in contrast to what is affirmed by
Ardrey and others, the whole phenomenon is primarily a cultural rather
than a biological ('hard-wired') affair; it seems to be about as old as
the human practice of making maps of fixed boundary-geometries, and has
almost certainly enjoyed pervasive influence only since the development
of printing and the dissemination of printed maps.
The desire for exclusive occupation of a 'natural' territory
does of course in many cases have a rational basis in requirements of defence.
This same desire exists today, however in Quebec, again, and also
in Ireland in a form where this military dimension is entirely lacking.
What is desired in these cases is not defensible territory but rather territory
within which a given group can give expression to the peculiarities of
its culture and, in tandem therewith, enjoy democratic advantage and control.
This same desire was illustrated in the 'bizarre shape' settled upon by
the British in their partition of Ireland in 1917; but it is illustrated
also in the desire of Irish Republicans to establish 'the whole island
of Ireland' as a single, sovereign entity. Gerrymandering can, it seems,
lead in different geometrical directions.
Prehistory
Examining the history of the very earliest human settlements we encounter
the following patterns. Groups, and the regions they occupy, exhibit a
tendency to expand until they reach physical obstacles such as coastlines,
or until they meet the resistance of an equal and opposite expansion on
the part of neighboring groups. Mutual adjustments very similar to those
effected spontaneously by bubbles on the surface of a soapy solution are
then encountered, and what look like clusters of bubbles can indeed be
found on maps depicting tribal expansion in early Africa.
It can lead also to the peaceful merging
of groups through intermarriage and through trade and other forms
of cooperation. A new, larger group is formed out of the coalescing of
smaller groups. (Again, the factor of public rhetoric on the part of poets
and other keepers of the tribal memory can both foster such coalescing
and also mitigate against it.)
There may occur also a splitting off of sub-groups who proceed to establish
new, disconnected territories in other regions. (Something like this was
involved in the colonization of the American continent.) The splitting
off of sub-groups can occur also involuntarily, for example via natural
disaster or by conquest leading to enslavement or to the agglomeration
of feudal territories into larger constellations of political power.
As the process of expanding and splitting occurs on all
sides, not least in response to the pressures on resources created by growth
in population, groups become variously dispersed and also interspersed.
But interspersion need not be experienced as such. If A's are to
the east and to the west, and B's are in the center, then neither the eastern
nor the western A's need feel any threat to the territorial integrity of
their respective groups. This will occur only if (i) the A's conceive themselves
as A's and as thus distinct from B's, and (ii) the entire territory
of the A's is conceptualized by the A's as a single 'natural' whole. Only
when both of these conditions are met will the B's be seen by the A's as
having the status of intruders. As to (i) we shall here leave to one side
the in itself important question as to the degree to which human groups
of different scales are real unities or to some degree products of beliefs
and practices on the part of their members. For it is condition (ii) which
is the principal focus of our present investigation.
The Role of Boundaries
We note that the likelihood of satisfaction of condition (ii) is at
least increased with the development of modern means of communication and
with the spread of the institutions of democracy. Thus in the period of
the agglomeration of feudal territories under the ownership of one single
lord in early modern Europe, this agglomeration caused no experience of
mixing, and hence no 'minorities'. Only with the growth of the modern conception
of the nation(-state) do the latter begin to make themselves felt. A group
of island dwellers might, for example, in light of this modern conception,
come to conceive the whole of the relevant island (Fiji, say) as its natural
and rightful home. They then begin to perceive the members of a second
group as alien interlopers. A related case involves not the natural borders
of an island but rather created, artificial borders of the sort which constitute
(most) nations and empires. Such artificial borders are, like maps, a cultural
phenomenon, a relatively late product of civilization. 'Artificial', here,
can mean either (a) not such as to follow natural borders of a topographical
sort (such as coastlines, mountain ranges, rivers) or (b) not such as to
reflect existing group divisions on the ground (or some combination of
the two). Such artificial borders, too, may create new politico geographical
entities within which a dominant group may come to see non-dominant groups
(for example Jews for much of European history) as interlopers deserving
of exclusion or elimination or isolation in ghettos. The redrawing of artificial
borders can also bring it about that formerly dominant majorities become
transformed into force dynamic remnants (this happened to the Serbs in
Croatia, to the Russians in Ukraine and Lithuania, to the Swedes in Finland,
to the 'Protestant Ascendancy' in Ireland).
Three Types of Spatial Object
We have distinguished three types of spatial object, as follows:
1. Bona fide spatial objects (for example islands, lakes):
objects whose boundaries are intrinsic physical discontinuities in the
material constitution of the earth.
2. Fiat spatial objects (for example counties, Indian reservations,
state parks): objects whose boundaries exist as a result of human fiat
or convention.
3. Force dynamic spatial objects (for example the area of land
occupied by a given infantry troop): objects whose boundaries are determined
by the actual or potential dynamic actions of their respective constituent
parts.
Under the first type are included spatial objects which would exist, and
would be set into relief in relation to their surroundings, even independently
of all human intervention, whether physical or cognitive. This type includes
also spatial objects such as polders and artificial lakes which are the
enduring products of human physical endeavor.
Objects of the second type begin to exist and are
sustained in existence only as a result of certain cognitive acts, practices
or institutions on the parts of human beings. There are no fiat objects
in the extra-human world. Such objects exist through and through as a matter
of convention. Consider for example the case of Wyoming and Colorado, which,
like many political and administrative spatial objects in the United States,
have rectangular shapes (or more precisely: they have shapes constructed
on the surface of the earth out of parallels of latitude and longitude).
Objects of the third type are geopolitical analogues of
the small-group territories and personal spaces discussed above. They are
characteristically transient, and tend to form systems with other third-type
spatial objects in relation to which they are subject to a very high degree
of reciprocal dependence in respect of their size, shape, location and
degree of elasticity.
Three Types of Spatial Boundary
Corresponding to the tripartite division of spatial objects is a parallel
tripartite division of types of spatial boundary:
1. bona fide boundaries, such as the fence around my neighbor's
garden or the coastline of New York;
2. fiat boundaries, such as the Mason-Dixon line and the Greenwich
Meridian;
3. force dynamic boundaries, such as the boundaries of British, French,
Dutch and Spanish influence in the continent of North America in, say,
1670.
Having made this further distinction we can now point to the obvious fact
of the existence of mixed cases: spatial objects whose boundaries are combinations
of the different elements here distinguished. The boundaries of most modern
nations involve a combination of bona fide and fiat elements. Geopolitical
entities of earlier eras (such as the Seljuk Kingdom of Iconium or the
Khanate of the Golden Horde) involved also force dynamic border-segments.
The great system of nations into which the land
surface of the earth has been divided in the modern period rests not onlyupon
reciprocal negotiation of shared boundary-stretches between neighboring
nations, but also upon a complex balancing act between groups of nations
joined together by treaty and pledged to defend each others' boundaries
and thus to preserve the equilibrium of the system as a whole.
The Primacy of Force Dynamic Spatial Objects
Historical and anthropological reflection will tell us, now, that objects
of the force dynamic type must in every case come first, that force dynamic
spatial objects must precede the tidily demarcated fiat and bona fide
spatial objects (nations, states, empires) with which we have grown
familiar in the course of recent history. As the historian Owen Lattimore
expresses it:
Frontiers are of social, not geographic origin. Only after the concept
of a frontier exists can it be attached by the community that has conceived
it to a geographical configuration. The consciousness of belonging to a
group, a group that includes certain people and excludes others, must precede
the conscious claim for that group of the right to live or move about within
a particular territory. (Lattimore 1962, p. 471)
How are we to do justice to these 'frontiers of social origin' and to the
processes by which they become attached to specific regions of space? Let
us emphasize once more that they do this not singly, but in groups and
in more or less harmonious consort. Only in the rarest of cases effectively
restricted to certain selected island nations favored by fate do
we have the possibility of a unilateral decision as to where the vague
and transient force dynamic territorial frontiers of a given social group
shall be converted into geopolitical boundaries of the crisp and stable
sort. In other cases, at least on those sides where the force dynamic boundaries
correspond to no impenetrable topographical features such as deserts or
mountain ranges, this determination must be made through a process of sometimes
violent reciprocal negotiation between pairs of neighbors. The Thirty Years
War is a process of negotiation of this sort, its goal in no small part
being one of setting an end to the systematic interfingering and overlapping
of force dynamic territories that was a product of differing religious
allegiances in continental Europe. Given groups were brought, by degrees,
to a position where they could claim to enjoy exclusive occupation of given
well-demarcated regions. The results of such negotiation had thereafter
to be defended and secured by treaty. The borders needed also, at least
in many cases, to be defended against encroachment from within, since new
force dynamic territories began to evolve, as groups (such as the Kurds
in Iraq and Turkey and the Basques in Spain), whose territorial claims
overlapped with those of the successful group, began to bring these claims
to expression by more or less violent means.
Corresponding to the three types of spatial object,
now, we can distinguish three types of nation, or three models or ideals
against which specific nations or nation-building projects may be judged:
1. the bona fide nation: this type is illustrated most clearly
by the great island nations: Iceland, Japan, Britain (we shall come to
Ireland later);
2. the fiat nation, illustrated most clearly by African and Middle-Eastern
nations, whose borders are to a large degree the products of colonialism
(of colonial fiat). Post-contact native American 'nations' (reservations)
would also fall under this heading;
3. the force dynamic nation: this type is illustrated for example by
those groups of diaspora Jews, of gypsies, of Saami and Inuit, of
Swedes in Finland, of Slovenes in Carinthia, of Poles in the era of partition
whose members feel themselves (to different degrees) as one, but
who have been denied or have renounced any claim to a physical territory
over which they would maintain exclusive jurisdiction.
The Origin of Fiat Boundaries
We are interested primarily in the spatial objects of the human world:
in counties, real estate parcels, nations, empires. How do such objects
come into existence?
Bona fide boundaries are, by definition, boundaries
we do not create but find there before us; we stumble over them. Fiat boundaries,
in contrast, are brought into existence by human cognitive acts and practices,
above all by cognitive acts and practices which are linguistic in nature.
The American Declaration of Independence is an example of a linguistic
initiation of an object of this sort, and fiat objects in general, like
many claims, obligations, laws, rights and titles, are tied intrinsically
to initiating utterances, to speech acts of precisely appropriate sorts.
There are also fiat initiations, belonging to the family of legislatings,
contractings, baptisings, ennoblings, and so on, which involve essentially
what we might call performative uses of maps. Thus Thomas Jefferson called
into being the states of the so-called Northwest Ordinance by drawing off
14 neat checkerboard squares between the boundaries of the Atlantic colonies
and the Mississippi River in 1784. Something similar is involved in the
creation of parcels of real estate via entries in cadastral registries,
and here we might note that again in marked contrast to what was
the case in the feudal period such real estate parcels are today
standardly continuous and simply connected.
The force of artificial borders patterned on this
model is illustrated most clearly in Africa, where the colonial powers
drew borders in ways which brought it about that different peoples came
to be living together within a single legal-political territory. The paradigm
instances of fiat nations in our sense (nations carved out via specific
acts of human fiat, whose boundaries may be built in whole or in part out
of exact geometrical figures, normally straight lines) are associated especially
with colonialism. They have borders drawn by governments (in London, Washington,
Ottawa, or Mexico City) before they know how things look on the ground.
Such borders can be quite stable and peaceful (this
applies even to the colonially drawn borders in the sub-Sahara region),
in contrast to the carefully drawn boundaries of Europe based on the idea
of a 'self-determination of nations'. Nations have however been known go
to war over borders of this artificial sort, sometimes protesting at their
very 'arbitrariness'. This is so far example in the case of Iraq, a fiat
spatial object formed in 1922 when Sir Percy Cox, the British High Commissioner,
drew lines in the sand marking the borders of Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia:
The three Ottoman vilayets (districts) of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul
were separated from Turkey, Syria, Trans-Jordan, and Kuwait and were combined
into a new Kingdom of Iraq Š under a British League of Nations mandate
that lasted until 1932. (Geyer and Green 1992, p. 34)
With the ending of the British protectorate in 1961, however, Premier Kassem
of the newly independent Iraqi nation announced immediately in Baghdad
that 'Kuwait is an integral part of Iraq.' The justification of such pronouncements,
then and later, rested not so much on intrinsic features of the land or
people; as Sir Anthony Parsons acknowledged some years later: 'We, the
British, cobbled Iraq together. It was always an artificial state; it had
nothing to do with the people who lived there.' (Loc. cit.) Rather,
the Iraqi claim rested on the sheer arbitrariness of the fiat boundaries
originally drawn in the sand or in other words on the geometrical
ideal of 'natural' bona fide borders.
Rome
If the fixed lines of fiat borders are a product of human culture,
then it seems reasonable to consider at what point in human history they
first appeared. The boundaries of group territories were initially not
fixed lines but rather force dynamic zones, to be accounted for
not topographically or cartographically but rather by appeal to military,
economic and ecological factors.
Even as late as, and in relation to as sophisticated a
product of human culture as the Roman Empire, it would be wrong to think
of outer boundaries as sharp divisions, analogous to lines on a map. Ancient
limes are not border lines but rather border lands
where different cultures and social groups, for example groups of traders,
nomads, farmers, meet and overlap, areas within which outposts of transport,
trade and defence are linked together. These are zones of ecological marginality
and demographic ambiguity. What explains why frontiers form as and where
they do at this stage of human development is the marginality of the land,
and in this respect we should bear in mind that the Roman emperors 'had
some awareness, however crude, of the marginal costs of imperialism.' (Whittaker
1994, p. 86) This implies further that the frontier wars which, in cumulation,
brought about the fall of the Empire are more like minor incursions, minor
irritations, than great meetings of armies. Rome fell not by incursions
of large enemies, but by a cumulation of pinpricks, by interlopers pretending
to be intrinsic parts of the Empire ('multiculturalism'), which then gradually
cut themselves off to form separate national groupings.
On the other hand however, as far as internal boundaries
of smaller-scale land-parcels are concerned, the Romans instituted very
early on the practice of land surveying and of rectangular cadastration.
The traditional date given to the terminatio ('the drawing up of
boundaries') for the city of Rome goes back to Numa, or in other words
to around 680 B.C. The art of land surveying (the art of the gromatici
or agrimensio) was called by Cassiodorus 'this disciplina mirabilis,
which could apply fixed reason to unlimited fields'. And as Whittaker points
out:
All rectangular surveys in history have had a strongly utopian character,
used in a period of expanding power and colonial foundations as the dream
of a distant administration for organized control. The great American Rectangular
Land Survey of the eighteenth century was [likewise] designed to bring
"order upon the land" at a time of particularly fluid frontiers. (Whittaker
1994, p. 19)
The grand projects of imperial cadastration were thus means of establishing
and organizing internal control; they and the corresponding concepts were
not as yet applied to the drawing of external frontiers. Again, therefore,
we have to recognize two kinds of boundaries: the fixed, fiat boundaries
of administered land, within the civitas or area of application
of the civil law; and the shifting force-dynamic boundary zones of unadministered
land, the area of application of military law.
The Middle Ages
In medieval times, too, the extent of the kingdom was determined not
by fixed external frontier (defense) lines marking out a certain territory,
but rather by property and allegiance. A kingdom is a king and all the
nobles, who were bound by a lien to follow him in battle. Such allegiances
are not always stable. The nobles may have powers and ambitions of their
own, which may result in the shifting of allegiances with a corresponding
redrawing of territories, sometimes in radically different ways from generation
to generation. The nobles in their turn had other lower-level noblemen
bound to them in chains of allegiance descending downward until ultimately
one arrives at farms (which include the peasants living on them) and thus
at territory. The area of a 'nation' thus defined need not be any single
contiguous region; this area could also quickly move (for example in the
case of the Greek lost cities in Italy). Mantua, Pisa, Barcelona, Venice,
Genoa, the Knights of Malta, the Hanseatic League, etc., are examples of
non-contiguous sovereign political entities of the given sort, marked by
frequent adjustment of borders, and there are many further such examples
in that patchwork of principalities and bishoprics which was the Holy Roman
Empire in, say, 1640.
Artificial borders seem to be absent from the Moslem conception
of geopolitics also. The Koran talks instead of a division of the world
into an ineluctably expanding Zone of Peace (ruled by Moslems) and a not
yet pacified Zone of War. Only provisional and temporary force dynamic
frontiers are allowed for in a world thus conceived, and Moslem princes
correspondingly viewed the declaration of fiat borders around small or
large blocks of territory by their enemies as a declaration of failure
and a mark of inferiority. (See Lewis 1993)
Towards Fixed and Determinate Fiat Boundaries
Relics of this same idea are present in Jefferson's vision of a country
spanning an entire continent ('from sea to shining sea'). Here, as in the
case of the Roman Empire during its period of expansion, there is originally
no line, but only a limitless, open territory to expand into, beyond which
there are barbarians, a wilderness which has to be brought under the control
of civilization. As Whittaker points out, 'countries that are expanding
have little interest in the limits to their power' (1994, p. 31). Only
the ultimate natural frontier which is the coastline (in the Irish case:
the whole island, in the Moslem case: the whole earth) can, according to
the internal logic of this principle of manifest destiny, bring the process
of expansion to a halt.
The problems with the principle and the ways in
which it leads to war and to inter-group conflict are clear: it ignores
the role of aboriginal peoples and of other rival groups, and thus it sets
aside the normally operative role of reciprocity in the establishing of
frontiers.
As Whittaker has argued, 'the very idea of a frontier as a line on
a map is modern' (1994, p. 71), amounting to the transfer of the idea of
internal cadastral boundaries to the realm of external frontiers.
It seems, in fact, to have been the French who were primarily responsible
for the consolidation and spread of this idea throughout the world, both
in theory and in practice. The concept of natural, linear frontiers derives
not least from the French fascination with potamologie or the
myth of river frontiers as divinely ordained. (See Sahlins 1989, pp.
34ff.) It was from this idea that the popular misconception of the Rhine
and Danube as Rome's natural frontiers was retrospectively derived. The
French took seriously the idea that existing European frontiers, as defined
by rivers, mountains and seas, are divinely ordained. We recall Danton's
famous speech of 1793 defining the new French nation: 'Ses limites sont
marquées par la Nature; nous les atteindrons toutes des quatre points
de l'horizon, du côté du Rhin, du côté l'Oceán,
du côté des Alpes.' The French central authorities then proceeded
to enforce linguistic homogeneity in brutal fashion upon the region
thus defined, in such a way as to create a single homogeneous 'modern'
state (and we can see how similar patterns followed later in Italy and
Germany). It was Napoleon, above all, who proceeded to impose the French
ideal upon the rest of Europe. The myth of potamologie encapsulated French
ambitions in Europe and in the Maghreb. A relic of this same obsession
with fixed linear defenses embracing homogeneous populations is illustrated
also in the construction of the Maginot line and, in another guise, in
contemporary efforts of the Académie Française to protect
the French language from the intrusion of alien anglophone expressions.
Hand in hand with the French cadastral ideal of fixed linear external frontiers
is the idea of compactness and convexity, an idea according to which the
natural shape of a nation is a continuous, broadly spherical (in the French
case: hexagonal) bubble. This idea encapsulates the geopolitical dream
of the nineteenth century, not only in Europe but also, and more systematically
and impressively, in Africa and in post-Jeffersonian America, where whole
continents were subjected to a process of geometrical tiling and thus divided
into nations and states on the basis of geometries inspired by the French
model. Irish 'Republicanism', too, is a still-living product of this model,
and of the violence and imperviousness to ground-level complexities with
which it was often originally associated.
The French ideal of the modern state is one which sees
the need to divide each larger continent into geometrically natural constituent
wholes (by analogy with a rectangular cadastre), and to ensure homogeneous
(especially linguistically homogeneous) populations within each region.
The ideal is standardly one according to which all and only the speakers
of a given language should co exist within a single continuous region enjoying
'natural' frontiers. (Consider the failed attempt by the authorities in
the Irish Free State to enforce Gaelic upon the population of the new Irish
nation.) The ideal worked, to a degree, in France, and it was to a degree
effective also in Italy, Spain and Germany, though each of these countries
has significant indigenous national minorities. But it could not be made
to work elsewhere in continental Europe, as is seen above all in the disasters
which followed Woodrow Wilson's embrace in 1918 of the principle of 'self
determination of nations'. As Kolnai wrote in 1946, reflecting on the regions
of Eastern and Central Europe:
Human society is not composed of nations ... in the same clear-cut
sense in which it is composed of individuals or, for that matter, of sovereign
states. The spectrum of nationalities is full of interpenetrations, ambiguities,
twilight zones. It follows that the conception of nationalism as a universal
principle, the conception of a 'just' or 'natural' order of nation states
is in fact and in theory pure utopia. There can be neither
an order of states nor of frontiers in which there does not enter to a
large extent the factor of arbitrariness, contingency and historical accident.
Pretending to 'purify' the body of mankind like other enterprises
of a naturalist, pseudo-rationalist sort purporting to lay down 'evident
principles' which generally prove to be illusory means to push arbitrariness
to its extreme limit (Kolnai 1946, p. 536).
The Empire of the Habsburgs
The Habsburg Empire was, as one says, a multinational state, at times
perforated, at times non contiguous, composed of a plurality of 'historico-political
entities' (historisch-politische Individualitäten), as one
called the different kingdoms, archduchies, duchies, margravates, principalities,
etc., in Austrian constitutional law. These several entities were themselves
far from being ethnically homogeneous. Bohemia and the western part of
the Kingdom of Hungary, and in particular the area including Buda and Pest,
had substantial German populations. There were both German and Rumanian
populations in eastern Hungary. The region of Trieste was inhabited by
a mixture of Italians, Germans and Slovenes. Galicia was populated by a
mixture of Poles, Ruthenians and Jews and one could extend this list
still further.
The different nationalities were scattered throughout the Monarchy,
so that no single ethnic or national group was confined to any one enclave
or locality. Some of the problems raised by these mixtures of populations
are still with us today, for example in Bosnia and in Transylvania. The
problems were made still more complex by the fact that a similar diversity
was present also in the religious life of the Empire, which encompassed
Catholics, Uniates, Protestants (among them Lutherans, Hussites, Calvinists
and others), Muslims and Jews, as well as practitioners of the Orthodox
religion, separated by lines or zones of division often running skew to
the lines and zones of division separating different national and ethnic
groups within the Empire.
This complexity of intervolvements led to some of the
most striking political alliances and divisions in the Monarchy. In Moravia,
Germans and Slavs lived in close interrelation, brought together most of
all by the Catholic Church and by a widespread bilingualism both
of which served also to temper nationalist feelings in the population of
Moravia as a whole. The Moravians indeed conceived their political allegiance
almost entirely in dynastic and Austrian terms, and were hardly susceptible
to extraneous Pan-Slavist or Pan-Germanic influences. The inhabitants of
Brno/Brünn, the Moravian capital, tended to take their cultural bearings
from Vienna, rather than from Prague, all ethnic and linguistic differences
notwithstanding.
In Bohemia, on the other hand, Germans and Czechs intermingled
hardly at all, the national (ethnic) division largely coinciding with a
difference in religion and in social class. There were, accordingly, a
significant number of Czech intellectuals in Bohemia, particularly after
the Austrian Compromise with Hungary, who readily embraced Pan-Slavist
ideology as a counterbalance to what they conceived to be an unjust treatment
of the Czechs by the new Austro-Hungarian authorities. Such intellectuals
then formed the nuclei of political movements which, under the influence
of France and England to which they became increasingly susceptible, served
as important dissolutionary forces within the Empire.
It was therefore not merely a complex congeries of nationalities
which made up the manifold character of the Austrian Empire. There were
also shared allegiances among different social groups, allegiances cutting
across national boundaries and making of Austria a political organism of
a quite peculiar sort. One expression of this fact is that, again, it is
impossible to speak of 'minorities' within the Empire, which was still
in this respect a product of the feudal, dynastic era of early modern Europe
The twilight zones of Eastern and Central Europe arose in virtue
of the fact that a combination of different factors is at work in determining
borders, factors which may yield conflicting results. Czechoslovakia, in
1918, was awarded the whole of the Sudetenland, in spite of the latter's
predominantly ethnic German population, because the Sudetenland had belonged
within the historical frontiers of 'Bohemia.'
Solutions to Inter-Ethnic Conflict
As Hayden has pointed out:
When the majority is mobilized on ethnic grounds, minorities are incompatible
with the definition of the state, and those that form a local majority
are likely to try to secede, particularly when they can anticipate acceding
to a neighboring state under the control of their ethnic confreres. This
is the situation of Serbs and Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Russians
in Ukraine and Moldova, Albanians in Kosovo and Macedonia, Armenians in
Nagorno-Karabakh, Kurds in Turkey, Iran and Iraq, Tamils in Sri Lanka,
and Muslim Kashmiris in India. (Hayden 1995, p. 65)
Ethnic mobilization, as is all too clear, can yield urgent problems calling
for diplomatic, political or in some cases military solution. The range
of 'solutions' to such problems which have standardly been considered include:
1. extermination or 'ethnic cleansing' (of Jews and Gypsies by Germans
in the Nazi era, of Moslems by Serbs in Bosnia);
2. expulsion (by Turkey of Armenians from Turkey and of Greeks from
Northern Cyprus; by Czechoslovakia and Poland of Germans after 1944);
3. enforced or economically supported relocation (by Austria of Germans
in the successor territories after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire;
by Stalin of Jews, Cossacks, Tartars, Germans and other groups);
4. enforced or economically supported isolation (by the United States
of native Americans; by Germans, Russians, Poles and others at various
times of Jews);
5. military rule (by India in Kashmir, by Israel on the
West Bank, by Serbia in Kosovo);
6. external imposition of authority (by the British under United Nations
mandate in Cyprus or Palestine, by NATO forces under the Dayton agreement
in Bosnia);
7. negotiated settlement leading to amicable distribution of democratic
rights within a single territory (by the citizens of Canada at this
writing in relation to Quebec; by the Finns and Swedes in relation
to Åland);
8. negotiated settlement leading to a splitting of territories (in
Pakistan with the formation of Bangladesh; in Czechoslovakia with the formation
of the Czech and Slovak Republics).
A Modest Proposal
All but the first of these solutions are clearly to be favored on the
minimal ground of respect for human life. Alternatives 4. to 8. are to
be favored further, however, in virtue of the fact that they do justice
to the feelings people have for their homes and for their land, for inherited
rights of occupation, for established households and communities. The thesis
to be considered here is that the range of these favored alternatives,
and above all the range of available alternatives under 7. and 8., can
be increased, if ways can be found to relax the geometrical constraints
associated with the French ideal of nationhood and of the acceptable shapes
of nations. The advocacy of non contiguous and of perforated nations is
designed to be fully consistent with the fundamental principles of international
law which dictate, for each given state, exclusive jurisdiction over its
national territory and over the permanent population living there together
with a duty of non intervention in the areas of exclusive jurisdiction
of all other states. The suggested adjustment relates exclusively to the
shapes of national territories that are to be made available as alternative
outcomes of diplomatic negotiations designed to lead to settlement of inter-group
disputes.
The imposition of new fiat boundaries is often recommended
also outside Europe as a solution to the tribal intermixings that were
brought about by colonial fiat boundaries. The onward march of political
liberalization in Africa is likely to encourage further moves of this sort
moves towards ethnic determination of territorial boundaries. Such
moves, if they are possible at all given existing constraints, would have
the advantage of involving no relocation of (or warfare between) peoples.
They amount, at least initially, to a mere abstract reconfiguration of
the pattern of fiat boundaries. But they will likely cause problems no
less serious than those currently faced by the populations of Rwanda, Burundi,
Liberia, and so on, and we are not advocating such moves here. Indeed we
believe that the idea of national self-determination, to the degree that
it presupposes that no intermixing obtains, is deeply flawed in relation
to the world as currently constituted. Even leaving aside mixed populations,
land is rarely capable of being cleanly divided according to any single
principle too many obstacles stand in the way, including resistant
topography, existing property rights and dynastic allegiances, existing
lines of communication and patterns of trade, as well as territorial divisions
based on religious and other affiliations. What we are suggesting, rather,
is that, where a point of irretrievable breakdown has in any case been
reached between ethnic or other groups living within a single territory,
the range of geometric alternatives brought forward for consideration in
the division of the territory should be seen as being wider than is dictated
by the French model based on the geometrical ideal of symmetric tiling.
Geometrical alternatives should be included which deviate from this model
to the extent that they serve the end of doing maximal justice to existing
(land and community) rights in such a way that rights of autonomy (and
even of sovereignty) should be granted to those who do not wish to relocate.
We would thus encourage efforts to find ways of ensuring that diplomats
and others involved in negotiations designed to lead to the resolution
of inter-group disputes to embrace in their deliberations a wider array
of geometrical alternatives than is at present allowed including
'bizarre shapes', perforated territories, and above all non-contiguous
territories.
Our proposal should not be confused with the advocacy
of new 'soft forms of union between national communities divided by international
frontiers.' As Schroeder points out, such proposals amount, in effect,
to the suggestion 'that nations skip a step in historical development.
History teaches that it is rarely possible to skip a step in this fashion.
Soft boundaries can only be established between states made up of peoples
who have achieved the identity, self-esteem, and dignity that flows from
having established a traditional nation state.' (Schroeder 1994, p. 161)
Such proposals underestimate the human emotional force of exclusive occupation
and the efficacy of the principle according to which 'good fences do good
neighbors make'. Moreover they stoke up trouble for the success of democratic
decision-making in the future.
The formation of ethnically homogeneous states may in
addition have certain intrinsic advantages. Schroeder, for example, has
argued that democracy presupposes a degree of ethnic homogeneity. and that
the problems in the former Yugoslavia derive from the fact that the process
of modern state formation was delayed there by 500 years of Turkish rule
and 50 years of communism. We are not endorsing these advantages here.
Rather we wish to point out only that, if they do exist, then efforts should
be made to investigate the degree to which they can be realized without
resort to ethnic cleansing or relocation.
Switzerland
Our proposal is similar to what is sometimes referred to as 'Cantonization',
an idea which served as the basis of the 'Careful Jigsaw' of the Vance-Owen
Peace Plan put forward in 1992. This plan was rejected by President Clinton
on (we would argue) geometric grounds of just the sort described above.
Had the Vance-Owen Plan been put into effect in Bosnia in 1992 (and had
it succeeded) it would have saved 200,000 lives.
There are many examples of non-contiguous nations across
the face of the earth: practically all island nations are non-contiguous
in the sense here at issue. Our more radical proposal countenances non-contiguous
nations whose constituent parts would be separated not be water but by
land and by other jurisdictions (as Alaska is separated from the rest of
the Continental United States by Canada). Switzerland, in dividing its
cantons, has whether consciously or not worked exactly according
to the principles of unconstrained geometry outlined above.The Swiss Canton
of Fribourg contains several portions which are completely surrounded by
the Canton of Vaud, which is, like several other cantons, a perforated
spatial object. Switzerland itself is perforated in that it circumcludes
inter alia the German town of Busingen on the Rhine, so that citizens
of Busingen who work in Germany must daily pass through eight national
borders on their journey to and from work. Switzerland in this respect
reveals its origins in the feudal order of early modern Europe. (The Campione
d'Italia is a similar isolated enclave of Italy surrounded entirely by
Switzerland. There are 38 such enclaves (exclaves: see Catudal 1979) between
Belgium and Holland in Baarle
and the Spanish commune of Llívia in the Cerdanya region of Catalonia
is entirely surrounded by France.) The Swiss have learned that borders
can be oddly shaped, and that the exploitation of bizarre shapes can be
a way of doing justice in peaceful fashion to inherited religious, linguistic,
ethnic or dynastic divisions. (The 'bizarre shapes' of some of the cantons
in Switzerland are a product of all of these factors.)
A similar idea might be applied also in relation to the
Irish problem. One idea to be brought forward for consideration might be
that of ceding to the Republic certain Catholic areas, even areas within
the interior of Northern Ireland as presently constituted, whose populations
overwhelmingly desire rule from Dublin. To establish the coherence of this
idea would require investigation of the logistical difficulties which would
arise in relation to the administration and government of the correspondingly
non-contiguous and perforated jurisdictions which would result. In Quebec,
similarly (and under the assumption that the dispute between the Francophone
separatists and other groups has become truly irreconcilable), solutions
to be considered might include the secession to (rest-)Canada of native
Canadian territories and of some predominantly anglophone regions of Quebec,
followed by the secession of a correspondingly perforated (rest )Quebec
from Canada as a whole.
Objections to the Proposal
We shall not go into detail here in giving an account of possible objections
to the proposals here advanced for consideration. One issue to be addressed
is the degree to which, in the Quebec case, the resultant perforated state
would be seen as doing justice to what we might call 'the honor of the
French.' Perforated nations prick pomposity (though we recall, once again,
that Italy has survived throughout its history as a perforated nation).
A perforated state may not do justice, either, to the native Canadian groups
within Quebec, who may have no wish to secede from Quebec and who seem
to have prior rights.
The notion of loose geometry would not find easy acceptance
on the side of the Irish Republican Army either, who want the 'whole island
of Ireland'. In each of these cases it is a matter of debate whether the
likely unwillingness to accept perforated or non-contiguous borders rests
on genuine grounds (for example pertaining to defence or supply considerations)
of a sort which would have been operative in previous centuries, or whether
their force derives rather from rhetorical devices of the sort that might
be countered, at least in principle, by rational argument.
Further problems which would arise through the embrace
of non-continuous nations turn for example on the fact that such countries
would require roads through the sovereign territory of other nations. Rights
of access can however be guaranteed by treaty (as the rights of access
to embassies, those odd examples of perforations within sovereign territory
which currently exist throughout the globe, have been successfully guaranteed
by treaty for many generations). The Vance-Owen Peace Plan involved an
'International Access Authority' to be established to guarantee freedom
of movement in Bosnia. And just as Alaska can communicate without problem
with the rest of the United States, so also, we might suppose, anglophone
portions of Canada surrounded by sovereign regions of a newly perforated
Quebec might be similarly in a position to communicate without problem
with the remainder of Canada. The degree to which problems might arise
in connection with such arrangements is, however, a matter for investigation.
God made Ireland; all the rest is the work of man
The Irish case differs in one respect from the other cases which have
been dealt with thus far, in that the rhetoric of Irish nationalism presupposes
a thesis according to which a genuine (free and sovereign) nation is one
whose boundaries are not merely (a): such as to comprehend a single connected
region (a region equivalent, topologically, to a circle), but also (b):
entirely physical in nature in the strong sense of encompassing the
entirety of the relevant surrounding area of land. 'Ireland cannot shift
her frontiers. The Almighty traced them beyond the cunning of man to modify.'
We recall also the first two articles of the Constitution of the Republic
of Ireland:
Article 1. The Irish nation hereby affirms its inalienable, indefeasible,
and sovereign right to choose its own form of Government, to determine
its relations with other nations, and to develop its life, political, economic
and cultural, in accordance with its own genius and traditions.
Article 2. The national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland,
its islands and the territorial seas.
Note, however, that even the unitary Ireland that is represented in the
mental maps of Irish Republicans is not a bona fide entity in the
sense defined in the foregoing. For we are not here dealing with a single
land-mass with autonomous physical frontiers, but rather with a complex
product of human demarcation. Ireland is not a single 'whole island' but
rather a super-unitary entity built up in fiat fashion out of non-continguous
parts (such as Inishkea, Inishmore, Inishbofin, Gorumna Island, and so
on), and in such a way as to exclude other non-contiguous parts such
as the Isle of Man in other ways comparable.
The overwhelming majority of geopolitical entities across
the surface of the globe are indeed such as to fall short of the topological
perfection of the bona fide spatial object, either because (like
Russia and the United States) they are super-unitary entities comprehending
non-contiguous parts, or because (like France and Germany, England and
Scotland, Ulster and Eire) they are sub unitary entities, the result of
a carving out of smaller fiat portions within some larger bona fide
whole. Were Poland, say, to embrace the logic of the Irish, and demand
autonomous coastal frontiers of her own, then Polish freedom fighters could
not rest until they had occupied the entire Eurasian landmass.
The attitude according to which (against so many established precedents)
geopolitical unities should approximate as closely as possible to the compact
topology of the circle is incidentally illustrated not only in Irish Republicanism
but also in the arguments of those American politicians and Supreme Court
Justices who would have it that newly drawn African American and other
minority Congressional districts should be ruled out as illegitimate already
on geometrical grounds, because of their 'bizarre shapes'. As Justice
O'Connor expressed it, praising 'compactness, contiguity, and respect for
political subdivisions': 'Appearances do matter'. But why do (geometrical,
topological) appearances matter? Are aspersions to be cast also on Denmark,
or Norway, or Malaysia, or the Canton of Vaud, or indeed on the United
States itself, on equivalent grounds?
The Duality of Violence
There are, it should by now be clear, those who would go to war, or
would deliver their sons to war, in order to institute a geometrical perfection
of a certain sort. The other side of this same coin, now, is a geometrically
motivated reluctance to defend territories or territorial appendages which
are not attached in appropriate fashion to the relevant home territory.
It is for geometrical reasons that Great Britain defends her compatriots
in Ulster less than enthusiastically (and thus justifies on the part of
the Irish Republican Army a certain faith in the ultimate victory of its
cause). For Northern Ireland is not a connected part of British territory
(any more than was India, Aden, Malta, Suez, Rhodesia). The English desire
to preserve the union with Wales and Scotland is stronger than her desire
to preserve the union with Northern Ireland, precisely because Scotland
and Wales do form with England a natural (organic, continuous) whole.
Secessionist movements in Wales and Scotland have on the other hand and
for the same reason proved less strong than have their counterparts in
Ireland.
The Virtues of Proximity
Any form of political activity is a priori likely to involve
a principle of proximity or neighborhood. That is to say, political concerns
are most likely to be directed to people and states of affairs with which
one is familiar, and political activity is the more likely to be effective
the more it is directed at what is proximate. But, and this is one central
argument of this essay, there are different types and principles of proximity.
The simplest type of proximity is spatial, and conceiving and drawing boundaries
on the basis of spatial proximity can yield benefits in terms of efficiency
and community (as well as benefits of a military sort, where these are
relevant). But there are many cases in human history where spatial proximity
has been overridden by other types of proximity (and the recent phenomenal
expansion of electronic communication is clearly bringing about an entirely
new sort of proximity, whose implications for the sorts of issues treated
here are still entirely unclear). The principle of proximity for Australians
was for a long time Anglo-Saxon culture ('Home'). This is now being replaced
by a principle which emphasises geographical proximity and economic effectiveness
('Asia'). It is not only for the cause of spatial proximity that wars are
fought. The investigation of different types and principles of proximity
is nonetheless to be recommended, since it would seem to have a multiplicity
of different sorts of light to throw on the causes of war, and on the methods
for the avoidance of war, in the future.
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