Aren national boundaries accidental and arbitrary?
Yes, they are; but this isn’t necessarily bad — not as long as political boundaries correspond to cultural (primarily, but not exclusively, linguistic) boundaries. The whole purpose of nationalism, as a political project, is to establish such a correspondence. It is the alternative to what one might call “mapism”: the belief that whatever lines currently drawn on maps are somehow sacrosanct. Nations are indeed accidental and arbitrary, and that’s the beauty of them. They are not designed and planned according to universally applicable specifications: they just grow. It is not entirely false to say that a people constitute a nation if they believe they are a nation; but this belief is caused by a complex of cultural, historical, and geographical preconditions. It is an open question, for example, whether Italy is one nation or two or three. (Somebody once told me that northern Italians call southern Italians Africans, and southern Italians call northern Italians Germans; and neither of
