Geographical, Sociological and Metaphysical Borders

Abstract

During the different ages of history and prehistory, borders have possessed different kinds of natures. Sometimes they did not exist, at other times they have been very diffuse, while at others they have been impassable. There were no borders in the Paleolithic age, or during Greece’s Heroic Age. It was not until the creation of the city-states and the empires that borders began to be consolidated. Territorial demarcations were not very strict during the Middle Ages, either. It was in the modern age that borders acquired an impassable nature, following the birth of the modern State, and they began to weaken with the crisis of the modern State that began in the 20th century. Thus, the author claims, the construction of borders is not a fundamentally political-administrative event. Instead, it seems to be primarily a phenomenon of a cultural nature and, more specifically, of a metaphysical nature.

Keywords

• Cultural identity
• boundaries
• interculturality
• history
• modernity
• universalism