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How European Colonial Borders Shaped Ethnic Tensions
When European powers relinquished control over their colonial holdings, they cleaved and spliced many different ethnic groups into artificial countries. The effects of this are still felt today.
By William Bishop, 18 September, 2021
Image Credit: Adalbert von Rößler (1922), Public Domain
The world is a very large place, and many nations have had a huge impact on what has happened over its long and varied history. It has been filled with conquerors and the conquered, but never has a period of conquerors been as impactful and its consequences more encompassing than the colonialism of the Victorian era.
During the century it lasted, a huge portion of Asia and all of Africa, with the exception of Ethiopia and Liberia, were invaded and conquered by European powers. These imperial states defined their borders along artificial lines, with only the goal of resource exploitation in mind. It would be this act that would leave political ramifications that are still seen today.
Colonialism has left huge scars in the modern world through the borders. When the colonial empires of Europe pulled out of Africa and Asia, they left the newly independent states in the borders that they established, cutting ethnicities in half, and combining rival cultures.
Nowhere is this more evident than the Indian subcontinent. When the British left India, they combined many different cultures and ethnicities into Pakistan, a country that never before existed, and which crosses many different ethnic lines. Its Indian border is built along the Radcliffe partition line which crosses straight through the province of Punjab, and separates the Punjabi community in half.
Its division is a cause of tension for both governments, as they each claim the province. To the other side of Pakistan, on the border of Afghanistan, is Durand line which isolates millions that claim to be Pashtun or Baloch. Pakistan refuses to return these lands, as that would mean the destruction of the artificial Pakistani nation, and the conflicts in the India-Pakistan region remain the most likely source for a modern nuclear war.
Today, overlapping ethnic boundaries in Armenia and Azerbaijan still drive the two nations to conflict. Central Intelligence Agency
Another region that has much conflict because of colonial borders is the Caucasus Mountains, specifically the Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict over the province of Nagorno-Karabakh. The problem arose from the Soviet invasion of the Caucasus in the 1920’s, where they invaded both Azerbaijan and Armenia and forced them to resolve the conflict by drawing artificial borders crossing ethnic lines.
This effectively served to weaken the power of each region and helped prevent effective opposition to what was considered to be an intrusive power. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly independent states of Armenia and Azerbaijan quickly reignited this feud over the province, with conflict and sporadic border engagements still ongoing to this day.
If the nations hadn’t been invaded and colonized by the Soviet Union, the problem wouldn’t exist because those artificial borders would have never been drawn. Additionally, since the Soviet government encouraged immigration to parts of the disputed zone, each nation now desires the whole province at the expense of the other. This is a long term catalyst for war in the area whose solution is still not in sight.
Lastly, South Africa is a great example of forcing conflicting ethnicities into a state together. The Union of South Africa is home to the Dutch Boers, the English settlers in the South, a great variety of different African ethnic groups such as the Zulu, and Indian settlers.
The conflicting governmental structures of the African ethnicities and the settler groups, as well as the inequities caused by centuries of colonization and Apartheid, has led to extreme racial violence between the different people of the Union. In many projections, it is theorized with some clarity that South Africa will collapse in the next few decades. If not for the British colonial efforts, there wouldn’t be this unholy union of people that still has lots of violent crime, and high racial violence levels.
The world has been scarred by the colonial powers, and these wounds have flared up into many deadly conflicts and wars such as the Congo War, the Bangladeshi Massacre, and the Rwandan Massacre. Internationally, we need to reevaluate the situation we have thrust onto so many nations to fix the problem we have created. We must work toward a world where borders follow historical and ethnic paths, not those of a long gone power hungry elite.