A Line Drawn in an Office

Lord Salisbury described the partition of Africa with unusual candour in 1890: we have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man's foot ever trod. It is an accurate account of how a great deal of the world's political geography was produced, and the striking thing is not that the lines were arbitrary but that they have proved so durable.

The durability was a choice. When African states became independent, the Organisation of African Unity adopted in 1964 the principle of uti possidetis: that new states inherit the administrative boundaries they had as colonies. The reasoning was brutally practical. Almost every border was arbitrary, so opening any one of them opened all of them, and a continent of border wars was a worse prospect than an inherited map. It looks cynical and it has probably prevented an enormous amount of killing.

Natural borders deserve a note, because the phrase does a lot of concealed work. Rivers are chosen because they are easy to describe in a treaty and easy to identify on the ground. They are not where people stop. Valleys are where the fields, the trade and the towns are, so a river typically runs through the middle of a community rather than between two of them. Mountains do better at dividing and are still frequently inhabited on both sides by the same people. Lines of latitude, which several countries use, have no relationship to anything whatsoever.

Partition is the sharper instrument and the more destructive one, because it converts a gradient into a line. Where two communities are interleaved across a region there is no line that separates them; there is only a line that decides who becomes a minority. That is why partitions reliably produce migration and violence rather than resolving tension, and it is why the record of them is so poor.

The 1947 partition of India supplies the detail that nobody quite believes. The barrister appointed to draw the boundary arrived in the country about five weeks before it took effect, had never previously visited, and worked largely from outdated maps and census returns. The line was announced two days after independence. For those two days, people celebrated without knowing which country their town was in. Somewhere between ten and twenty million people moved in the following months.

What makes an arbitrary line consequential, in the end, is not its arbitrariness. It is permanence. A line becomes a customs post, then a currency, then a school system, then an army, then a passport, then an identity, and within two generations it is defended by people whose grandparents lived on the other side. That process, not the original cartography, is why a map drawn in European capitals in 1885 is still legible in today's newspapers.

It also disposes of an argument that sounds strong and proves far too much. Secession claims often rest on the observation that a border was drawn arbitrarily by a colonial power. The observation is almost always correct, and it applies to nearly every state in the world, which is precisely why uti possidetis exists. The secession cases that succeed usually rest on something else: a government that already functions, or a record of violence that makes the existing arrangement untenable.