XI + 

The earth that the geographer surveys is divided into five great land masses. These land masses in turn can be broken up into a number of natural regions, each of which has within its rough and approximate frontiers a certain complex of soil, climate, vegetation, and, arising out of these, certain primitive occupations which the inhabitants of the region originally practiced and later, through the advance of trade and invention, elaborated. Between these natural regions there are occasionally frontiers, such as the barrier of the Pyrenees which separates “France” from “Spain”; but these barriers have never altogether prevented movements of population from one area to another. In order to have a more faithful knowledge of regional groupings in certain important areas, the reader might with profit consult Professor Fleure’s Human Geography in Western Europe. (London: Williams and Norgate.) + 

These natural regions are the groundwork of human regions; that is, the nonpolitical grouping of population with respect to soil, climate, vegetation, animal life, industry and historic tradition. In each of these human regions we find that the population does not consist of a multitude of atomic individuals: on the contrary, when the geographer plots houses and buildings on a topographic map, he finds that people and houses cohere together in groups of more or less limited size, called cities, towns, villages, hamlets. Normally, a vast amount of intercourse takes place between these groupings; and in the Middle Age, before the utopia of the National State had been created, the pilgrim and the wandering scholar and the journeyman and the strolling player could have been met with on all the highways of Europe. Under the dispensation of the National State, however, the population, as the German economist Buecher points out, tends to be more settled, and we transport goods rather than people. It is important to realize that, so far as the geographer can discover, this trade and intercourse between local groups has been a part of Western European civilization since Neolithic times, at least: it takes place continually between individuals and corporate groups in one place and another, and as far as geographical facts are concerned might more easily exist between Dover and Calais, let us say, than between Calais and Paris. + 

Now the interesting thing about the utopia of the National State is that it has only the most casual relation to the facts of geography. Wherever it suits the purposes of the Guardians of the State, the facts are ignored, and an artificial relation is willed into existence. The human communities which the regional sociologist recognizes do not always coincide with those which the statesman wishes to incorporate as “national territory,” and when this conflict occurs, the idea rather than the reality triumphs, if necessary by brute force. + 

In the utopia of the National State there are no natural regions; and the equally natural grouping of people in towns, villages and cities, which, as Aristotle points out, is perhaps the chief distinction between man and the other animals, is tolerated only upon the fiction that the State hands over to these groups a portion of its omnipotent authority, or “sovereignty” as it is called, and permits them to exercise a corporate life. Unfortunately for this beautiful myth, which generations of lawyers and statesmen have labored to build up, cities existed long before states⁠—there was a Rome on the Tiber long before there was a Roman Imperium⁠—and the gracious permission of the state is simply a perfunctory seal upon the accomplished fact. + 

Instead of recognizing natural regions and natural groups of people, the utopia of nationalism establishes, by the surveyor’s line, a certain realm called national territory, and makes all the inhabitants of this territory the members of a single, indivisible group, the nation, which is supposed to be prior in claim and superior in power to all other groups. This is the only social formation that is officially recognized within the national utopia. What is common to all the inhabitants of this territory is thought to be of far greater importance than any of the things that bind men together in particular civic or industrial groups. + 

Let us look at this world of national utopias. The contrast between the politician’s map and the geographer’s would be little less than amazing were our eyes not used to it, and were we not taught in modern times to look upon it as inevitable. Instead of the natural grouping of land masses and regions, one finds a multitude of quite arbitrary lines: boundaries like those that separate Canada and the United States or Belgium and the Netherlands are just as frequent as the natural frontier of sea that surrounds England. Sometimes these national territories are big, and sometimes they are little; but the bigness of empires like those of France, England, or the United States is not due to any essential identity of interests between the sundry communities of these empires, but to the fact that they are forcibly held together by a political government. National lines, in other words, continue to exist only as long as the inhabitants continue to act in terms of them; are ready to pay their taxes to support customs bureaus, immigration offices, frontier patrols, and educational systems; and are prepared, in the last extremity, to lay down their lives to prevent other groups from crossing these imaginary lines without permission. + 

The chief concern of the national utopia is the support of the central government, for the government is the guardian of territory and privilege. The principal business of that government is to keep the territory properly defined, and to increase its limits, when possible, so as to make the taxable area larger. By stressing the importance of these concerns, and constantly playing up the dangers of rivalry from other national utopias, the State builds a bridge between the Country House and Coketown, and persuades the workers in Coketown that they have more in common with the classes that exploit them than they have in common with other groups within a more limited community. It would seem that this reconciliation of Coketown and the Country House is little less than miraculous, even as an ideal; and perhaps it would be interesting to examine a little more carefully the apparatus by which this is effected. + 