The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,157

status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or institutional status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, nonself-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.

It’s tempting to dismiss this manifesto as feel-good verbiage. But in endorsing the Enlightenment ideal that the ultimate value in the political realm is the individual human being, the signatories were repudiating a doctrine that had reigned for more than a century, namely that the ultimate value was the nation, people, culture, Volk, class, or other collectivity (to say nothing of the doctrine of earlier centuries that the ultimate value was the monarch, and the people were his or her chattel). The need for an assertion of universal human rights had become evident during the Nuremberg Trials of 1945–46, when some lawyers had argued that Nazis could be prosecuted only for the portion of the genocides they committed in occupied countries like Poland. What they did on their own territory, according to the earlier way of thinking, was none of anyone else’s business.

Another sign that the declaration was more than hot air was that the great powers were nervous about signing it. Britain was worried about its colonies, the United States about its Negroes, and the Soviet Union about its puppet states.166 But after Eleanor Roosevelt shepherded the declaration through eighty-three meetings, it passed without opposition (though pointedly, with eight abstentions from the Soviet bloc).

The era’s repudiation of counter-Enlightenment ideology was made explicit forty-five years later by Václav Havel, the playwright who became president of Czechoslovakia after the nonviolent Velvet Revolution had overthrown the communist government. Havel wrote, “The greatness of the idea of European integration on democratic foundations is its capacity to overcome the old Herderian idea of the nation state as the highest expression of national life.”167

One paradoxical contributor to the Long Peace was the freezing of national borders. The United Nations initiated a norm that existing states and their borders were sacrosanct. By demonizing any attempt to change them by force as “aggression,” the new understanding took territorial expansion off the table as a legitimate move in the game of international relations. The borders may have made little sense, the governments within them may not have deserved to govern, but rationalizing the borders by violence was no longer a live option in the minds of statesmen. The grandfathering of boundaries has been, on average, a pacifying development because, as the political scientist John Vasquez has noted, “of all the issues over which wars could logically be fought, territorial issues seem to be the one most often associated with wars. Few interstate wars are fought without any territorial issue being involved in one way or another.”168

The political scientist Mark Zacher has quantified the change.169 Since 1951 there have been only ten invasions that resulted in a major change in national boundaries, all before 1975. Many of them planted flags in sparsely populated hinterlands and islands, and some carved out new political entities (such as Bangladesh) rather than expanding the territory of the conqueror. Ten may sound like a lot, but as figure 5–21 shows, it represents a precipitous drop from the preceding three centuries.

Israel is an exception that proves the rule. The serpentine “green line” where the Israeli and Arab armies stopped in 1949 was not particularly acceptable to anyone at the time, especially the Arab states. But in the ensuing decades it took on an almost mystical status in the international community as Israel’s one true correct border. The country has acceded to international pressure to relinquish most of the territory it has occupied in the various wars since then, and within our lifetimes it will probably withdraw from the rest, with some minor swaps of land and perhaps a complicated arrangement regarding Jerusalem, where the norm of immovable borders will clash with the norm of undivided cities. Most other conquests, such as the Indonesian takeover of East Timor, have been reversed as well. The most dramatic recent example was in 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait (the only time since 1945 that one member of the UN has swallowed another one whole), and an aghast multinational coalition made short work of pushing him out.

FIGURE 5–21. Percentage of territorial wars resulting in redistribution of territory, 1651–2000

Source: Data from Zacher, 2001, tables 1 and 2; the data point for each half-century is plotted at its midpoint, except