Artificial states? On the enduring geographical myth of natural borders

Alberto Alesina, William Easterly and Janina Matuszeskiʹs paper Artificial States, published as a National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper in June 2006, suggests a theory linking the nature of country borders to the economic success of countries (Alesina, Easterly, & Matuszeski, 2006). This paper critically examines this suggestion that natural boundaries and ethnic homogeneity are desirable for economic reasons. It takes issue with the understanding of artificial and natural boundaries that they develop, arguing that this ignores two centuries of critical and quantitative geographical scholarship that has mapped, documented and critiqued the obsession of a link between topography and the appropriate shape of states and boundaries. It explores how their argument is linked to a defence of ethnically homogeneous states. The focus is on their teleological and paradoxically ahistorical vision that naturalizes politics by appealing to spatial myths of homogeneity and geometric destiny, grounded in a reactionary understanding of space as container. In so doing, I am mindful of the strong links between such proposals and calls for post-conflict partition, and the corresponding discourses of ethnic and cultural homogenization on which they rely. Instead of thinking of boundaries as geometric objects, squiggly or not, I consider boundaries through the simultaneous processes of reification, naturalization, and fetishization.