The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,158

for the last half of the 20th century, in which each point represents a quarter-century.

The psychology behind the sanctity of national boundaries is not so much empathy or moral reasoning as norms and taboos (a topic that will be explored in chapter 9). Among respectable countries, conquest is no longer a thinkable option. A politician in a democracy today who suggested conquering another country would be met not with counterarguments but with puzzlement, embarrassment, or laughter.

The territorial-integrity norm, Zacher points out, has ruled out not just conquest but other kinds of boundary-tinkering. During decolonization, the borders of newly independent states were the lines that some imperial administrator had drawn on a map decades before, often bisecting ethnic homelands or throwing together enemy tribes. Nonetheless there was no movement to get all the new leaders to sit around a table with a blank map and a pencil and redraw the borders from scratch. The breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia also resulted in the dashed lines between internal republics and provinces turning into solid lines between sovereign states, without any redrafting.

The sacralization of arbitrary lines on a map may seem illogical, but there is a rationale to the respecting of norms, even arbitrary and unjustifiable ones. The game theorist Thomas Schelling has noted that when a range of compromises would leave two negotiators better off than they would be if they walked away, any salient cognitive landmark can lure them into an agreement that benefits them both.170 People bargaining over a price, for example, can “get to yes” by splitting the difference between their offers, or by settling on a round number, rather than haggling indefinitely over the fairest price. Melville’s whalers in Moby-Dick acceded to the norm that a fast-fish belongs to the party fast to it because they knew it would avoid “the most vexatious and violent disputes.” Lawyers say that possession is nine tenths of the law, and everyone knows that good fences make good neighbors.

A respect for the territorial-integrity norm ensures that the kind of discussion that European leaders had with Hitler in the 1930s, when it was considered perfectly reasonable that he should swallow Austria and chunks of Czechoslovakia to make the borders of Germany coincide with the distribution of ethnic Germans, is no longer thinkable. Indeed, the norm has been corroding the ideal of the nation-state and its sister principle of the self-determination of peoples, which obsessed national leaders in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The goal of drawing a smooth border through the fractal of interpenetrating ethnic groups is an unsolvable geometry problem, and living with existing borders is now considered better than endless attempts to square the circle, with its invitations to ethnic cleansing and irredentist conquest.

The territorial-integrity norm brings with it numerous injustices, as ethnic groups may find themselves submerged in political entities that have no benevolent interest in their welfare. The point was not lost on Ishmael, who mused, “What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish?” Some of Europe’s peaceful borders demarcate countries that were conveniently homogenized by the massive ethnic cleansing of World War II and its aftermath, when millions of ethnic Germans and Slavs were forcibly uprooted from their homes. The developing world is now being held to higher standards, and it is likely, as the sociologist Ann Hironaka has argued, that its civil wars have been prolonged by the insistence that states always be preserved and borders never altered. But on balance, the sacred-border norm appears to have been a good bargain for the world. As we shall see in the next chapter, the death toll from a large number of small civil wars is lower than that from a few big interstate wars, to say nothing of world wars, consistent with the power-law distribution of deadly quarrels. And even civil wars have become fewer in number and less damaging as the modern state evolves from a repository for the national soul to a multiethnic social contract conforming to the principle of human rights.

Together with nationalism and conquest, another ideal has faded in the postwar decades: honor. As Luard understates it, “In general, the value placed on human life today is probably higher, and that placed on national prestige (or ‘honor’) probably lower, than in earlier times.”171 Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union during the worst years of the Cold War, captured the new sensibility when he said, “I’m not some czarist officer who has to kill