30 October

Border protection gets people excited. One of the things I reckon is not said much is that a national border isn't a physical thing. It's a legal thing. All national borders are the result of an agreement, between countries - those lines on the map aren't physical, they represent those agreements. Following on from the Thirty Years' War post yesterday, modern nation-states were formed at the end of that war. They were a diplomatic solution to stop the killing - within each of those new territories (what we now call 'countries'), the people had 'sovereign' right to self-determination, including to practice their own religion - mostly what the Thirty Years' War had been fought over. When people today say that 'protecting our borders' is more important than any international legal obligations we have, I think they're terribly mixed up. The border itself IS an international legal obligation, and nothing more. Without the international legal agreements, we would have no border in the first place.