Lesson in Geography: Countries

What do words mean in politics? Do we actually know what each term cover? Do they mean the same things when you utter them compared to others? I give you some examples and you could think about it. What is a country? What is a nation? Why are the borders created the way they are on the maps? Who lives in a country? Do all those people get to live in the same country because they speak the same language? Do they share the same culture? Do they have same customs and beliefs? Well, your answers would depends on where you live and how you were raised and what kind of education you received.

I strongly believe that geography is made up just as it is drawn on the paper. After the First World War and after the Second World War some of the leaders got together and they literarily started to draw lines on the map to negotiate among the countries. The winners took whatever they could. The United Nations includes 193 countries. Some other countries are still fighting to be recognized by international bodies, so like it or not, it all depends on the agreement of people. The boarders are not geological, they are not seen from space, they don’t even depend on language, culture or shared customs. Recognized countries only depend on the winners of history.

Do these winners who create countries care about the actual people who live there? Do they consider the different ethnicities, their languages, their social ties, their customs, their culture? Most of the time they don’t. Our country, Canada is an exception in a sense because we are mostly immigrants who came here and agreed to live together peacefully in a multicultural society.

In the continents where we came from however, history played a tug of war with borders and the concept of the word country, of course with the exception of Africa where people tribal identity is more important and where hundreds of years of exploitation exhausted their resources as well as kept people in poverty. 

Countries represented by their flags. If yo remove people and their buildings from the boarders, there is nothing geologically showing where one country begins and the other ends