After the convulsions that followed the collapse of European imperialism in Asia and Africa, we had once again become accustomed to the idea that the map as we knew it was static and fixed. The emerging global village was supposed to have transcended endless 19th- and early 20th-century squabbling, ethnic rivalry, and religious sectarianism that had led to the bloody creation and destruction of nation-states.

Then came the end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union. Suddenly all those weird -stan (“country”) suffixes—Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan—that we once read about only in 19th-century novels of British imperialism or  remembered from old weathered atlases were back again. Surely no one in the 1980s thought we would ever see again an independent Croatia, Slovakia, or Serbia, the latter remembered in our textbooks only in the context of having something to do with the cause of the First World War. 

For all the eloquent eulogies over the demise of the nation-state, these 19th-century relics reappear almost yearly. Just when we thought that the former Yugoslavia could not  fragment into any more national entities, suddenly an independent Kosovo appeared—apparently a result of the Muslim, Albanian-speaking majority wanting nation-state status. The so-called Middle East crisis once morphed from a border dispute between Israel and Jordan into fighting with independent Palestinians over the West Bank. And now it has devolved again into a sort of tripartite gunfight among Israel, the West Bank, and the newly emerging Gaza. 

The world continually reshuffles and realigns as demography, resources, ideologies, religions, and the environment are in a state of constant flux.

Either out of fear of terrorism, or anti-Semitism and anti-Westernism, or due to calculations about demography and petroleum, the world singularly condemns Israel for occupying the West Bank. It forgets that there are just as serious disputes over borders, occupations, and national sovereignty between Armenia and Azerbaijan, fights between Greeks and Turks over Cyprus, and Japanese complaints over a Russian presence in some of the Kurile Islands. 

Countries as diverse as Spain and China were not eager to recognize the newly autonomous Kosovo from fear that a “me too” effect would birth infants like a Basque state, Catalonia, and Tibet. 

Wars and the creation of new states don’t always involve rational calculation about natural resources or even demography as much as honor and pride. Great Britain and Argentina fought over windswept islands of little value in the South Atlantic, as the world watched to see whether they would remain the Falklands or transmogrify into something called the Malvinas—which the President of Argentina recently asserted is still part of that country. 

What causes these readjustments and prompts new nations seemingly to pop out of nowhere?

The usual culprits, of course. 

The age-old disintegration of empires and cobbled-together federated states leads to more natural racial, ethnic, or religious enclaves. The dissolution of the British, French, and Spanish colonial empires refashioned the map of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And much of the turmoil in the current Middle East follows from the arbitrary British and French partitions of Arabia, the Punjab, and the Maghreb. Almost all the world’s most recent boundary changes followed the end of the Soviet Union and the decoupling of its regional protectorates in the Balkans, the Baltic, and Eastern Europe. 

But boundary readjustment is not always a case of the small emerging from the big. If balkanization is powered by the age-old prejudices, pride, and chauvinism of the masses, in contrast, consolidation these days follows from the dreams of intellectuals and elites who strive for economic efficiency or entertain dreams of a one-continent or one-world peaceful state. The European Union—to avoid past bloodletting, to create economic efficiencies, and to institutionalize shared political and economic values—is trying to erase the myriad borders of Western and Eastern Europe. 

Traditionalists fear that there are many internationalists who would like to see the North American Free Trade Agreement emulate the metamorphosis of the old European Common Market, and so turn into something like a North American Union in which the old borders of Canada, the United States, and Mexico vanish. The dream of a crackpot Osama Bin Laden is the not-so-crackpot notion of a pan-Islamic caliphate energized by oil and Muslim fundamentalism. 

Finally, we forget that a large part of the world is not so much postmodern as pre-modern, with de facto boundaries that civilization crosses only at its peril. Americans are learning that there is something called Waziristan, where some believe Osama bin Laden finds sanctuary. At various times we saw that Colombia and Mexico had lost control of their tropical interiors to provisional states. Darfur is not so much disputed as wild. 

The next scramble to redraw boundaries may be over the virgin Arctic Circle, where  Russia, Canada, the United States, and Scandinavian states are all staking claims to a shrinking polar ice cap in hopes of grabbing oil and mineral rights and new routes of northern transit should the ice continue to melt. 

The truth is that there is no single global trend toward either consolidation or disunion. Instead, the world continually reshuffles and realigns as demography, resources, ideologies, religions—and even the environment—all are in a state of constant flux. 

Victor Davis Hanson, a classics scholar and military historian, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Photo Illustration by Matt Selva; Veer; iStockPhoto.