A critical component of those modern mechanisms is that land claims can be put to rest. That after a border's acknowledged for a long time, it becomes the border, and everyone has to respect it even if we can't condone the process that created it. Under a standard where territorial claims can be resurrected at any time - where Mexico can declare it owns California, and Britain can declare it owns the Eastern Seaboard, and the US can declare it owns Phillipines - modern mechanisms won't function.
What? Russia claimed it owns part of Ukraine earlier this decade. Sudan split into two countries. There’s an ongoing dispute over islands between China and Japan. There’s also Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The Kurds get pushed around by the 4 nation-states who each claim part of their ancestral territory. India, Pakistan, and China all claim Kashmir.
Last century, Israel was created after a war. The Ottoman Empire was partitioned. Tibet was claimed by China. Germany was split in half and then reunited. The USSR split apart. The US annexed part of Samoa, and made states out of Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico, Alaska and Hawai’i. Carving Africa into lines started in 1880. There are dozens of other examples, some administrative and some violent.
Your claim boils down to “a border is a border, until it isn’t.” How is that different from how it’s always been?
I'm not sure I follow the question. A lot of the disputes you mention here are terribly violent, which is why I so strongly oppose efforts to create more of them. A border should almost always remain a border - the process of unmaking a border is so inherently dangerous that only the most extreme circumstances can possibly justify it.
I guess I’m questioning how much the establishment of “more fixed borders” changes anything. I for one don’t know how frequently the indigenous nations in the Americas had fights over territory.
People being people, my suspicion is that it wasn’t all that different from today: peaceful agreements about who uses what land when, with bouts of violence or negotiation when circumstances changed. Wars take a high toll, so they aren’t pursued for fun, especially when they involve a much larger portion of a nation’s population than they do today.
