Balkan Academic Book Review 8/2000
_______________________________________

Ekkehard W. Bornträger, Borders, Ethnicity and National Self-Determination, Ethnos 52. Vienna: Braumüller, 1999. 110 pp., DM 35 (ATS 256, SFR 33), ISBN 3-7003-1241-5
Reviewed by Rainer Ohliger (Humoldt-Universität zu Berlin, Sozialwissenschaften).
_______________________________________

Borders have become a fashionable, not to say trendy topic in social scientific, historical and anthropological research ever since the static world of pre-1989 collapsed and old securities and convictions were questioned. The malleability as well as the permeability of borders has increasingly drawn attention not only from the scientific community, but also from the political arena. Be it the new lines of division along ethnic borderlines or the project of implementing transborder cooperations in which the European Union heavily invests with a number of large programs. However, almost all the projects share a common underlying assumption: they take boundaries, frontiers, borders and borderlines as a political given that is not to be touched or changed.
Ekkehard Bornträger takes a different, iconoclastic stance towards this issue. In his booklet „Borders, Ethnicity and National Self-determination“ he raises the question of whether redrawing political borders can, or better, should be an instrument of creating not only a just order within the sphere of nation states and international relations but also a method of preventing conflicts rather than causing them. The author does not only raise this question in order to discuss it in a merely scientific way arguing the pros and cons. Further he takes clear sides and prescribes border changes and revisions as a, if not the, solution to ethnic and ethnopolitical conflicts in our modern world. Arguing simultaneously against the established camps of status quo oriented realpolitiker, future oriented post- and transnationalists, flaky cosmopolitans with a multicultural grounding as well as the neo-liberal fraction of globalization adherents, the author tries to (re-)establish geopolitical categories and their recognition into (continental) political thinking. And he does this, one has to admit, even when being skeptical about his recipes in a very well informed, highly knowledgeable, and pleasantly concise and precise way.
Bornträger provides historical as well as contemporary evidence on a comparative level for his main argument that border changes are not evil and the cause of conflicts, but that the very proliferation of the conviction opposing the changing of established borders is (partly) at the heart of contemporary as well as historical conflicts. From a historical point of view his argument that border changes were and are the rule rather than the exception cannot be denied. Borders have never been final and were always open to change: „Historically there is no evidence of an irreversible teleological development toward definitive borders“ (p. 3). However, he goes further than just stating the obvious. He claims that contrary to popular (scientific) belief border changes do not mean the risk of conflict or war but on the contrary often have the opposite effect of conflict prevention.
As the end of borders is not in sight in a world of nation states, and Bornträger does not believe in the decline or demise of the nation-state, the issue of how to establish and keep up a viable border regime within this political framework needs to be solved. The magic key the author seems to offer is conceiving nation state borders along ethnic or better ethnocultural lines. Referring not only to the European experience, but also to (postcolonial) Asia, Latin America and Africa he draws the conclusion that within the processes of nation building and state formation self determination along ethnic lines is or should be the key variable when it comes to the question of drawing state borders. As much as one might follow this argument when doing historical analysis (or better: analyzing nationalist historical idioms and discourses), so one might want to question the validity of this argument in the light of the debate on nationalism, nation building and state formation which dominated scholarly debates from the 1980s on.
The main criticism of Bornträger is probably that he operates with a rather static notion of ethnicity and nation, not taking into account the volatility and constructedness of these categories, thus more or less ignoring one of the key arguments within the debate of the past decades. Ironically he thus ends up committing the crime he blames his opponents of, namely essentializing categories as unquestionable or even eternal. Whereas the advocates of the status quo actually tend to have a rather static or essentialized notion of state borders, Bornträger essentializes ethnic groups and nations as historical and political actors and agents. The in-betweeness of these groups, particularly in border regions and in politically contested areas is something he does not address at all. In this respect his otherwise well-crafted argument tends to be either black or white. This becomes particularly evident in the last part of the book where he addresses the question of the German-Polish border, its historical predicaments in the 20th century and particularly the question of border recognition and the situation of ethnic Germans in contemporary Poland. The scientific argument he builds up in the early chapters of the book loses its merit when the author takes clear political sides in this issue. Not only that he does not show much of an understanding of the ethnically mixed culture and contested ethnicity in Upper Silesia which he takes as an example, also his criticism of Germany having de jure recognized the Oder-Neisse as a state border in 1990 does not add very much to the scholarly debate.
Moreover, one might want to question his factual statement about the non-existence of bilingual or mother tongue education for ethnic German children in contemporary Poland (p. 89). His argument that a lack of German language education for the German minority is an effect of restrictive Polish minority policy neglects completely that bilingual teachers in Upper Silesia are a scarce commodity as an effect of sheer market forces: they rather work as translators for binational or international companies than as underpaid teachers. It’s a pity that the author who makes a valuable contribution to a debate, which might scare away the politically correct members of the scientific community, devalues parts of his credibility by politicizing his arguments. Thus reading his book leaves the reader with mixed feelings. On the one hand it offers a lot of insightful and thought provoking ideas, on the other hand one is not completely sure where the author’s scientific agenda ends and where his political one starts.
______________________________________________________

© 2000 Balkan Academic News.

This review may be distributed and reproduced electronically, if credit is given to Balkan Academic News and the author. For permission for re-printing, contact Balkan Academic News.