Before I comment on the message below, I'd like to say that I'm a
new member of the group who has been silently observing for a few
days. I've been an afficionado of boundaries and their functions
since I had the pleasure of doing graduate study in political
geography under the pioneering forensic geographer Dr. Milton B.
Newton about 25 years ago at Louisiana State University.
The functional dichotomy between boundaries as "meeting-places"
and "cut-off lines" that is mentioned below reminds me of what
Friedrich Ratzel wrote in his "Laws on the Spatial Growth of States"
(1896). Ratzel proposed an organic analogy for the state that was
misused to justify Nazi imperialism some decades later. That
political incorrectness aside, his fourth law says that the boundary
is the peripheral organ of the state. By this he means that it is
not only the skin, but the semi-permialbe cell membrane of the
state. It is through this membrane that the state absorbs resources
from without, even while using it to filter out that which it does
not want to come within. Conversely, the same membrane seeks to
contain all that is desirable within the state, while expelling
whatever wastes it can. It is also through the boundary that a
state receives the simuli that cause its reactions in its realtions
with its neighbors, and it is the site at which any growth of the
state occurs.
Far from being the outer edge or last end of something, a bounday is
a thing of great vital importance to the states on both of its sides.
Lowell G. McManus,
Leesville, Louisiana, USA
--- In BoundaryPoint@yahoogroups.com, "Jan S. Krogh"
<jan.krogh@t...> wrote:
> The Nijmegen Centre of Border Research
> «In the dynamics of the internationalisation and globalisation
geographical
> borders are more and more considered as challenges for further
integration.
> At the same time however, borders still are considered to be
barriers in
> many ways. Borders represent important values of identity of
people and
> demarcate the sovereignty of governments. Because of this tension
between
> borders as 'meeting-places' and borders as 'cut-off lines' borders
have
> become maybe more important then ever before in the European
society.»:
>
> http://www.kun.nl/ncbr/
>
> Looks interesting to me!
>
> Jan
> ---
> Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
> Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
> Version: 6.0.491 / Virus Database: 290 - Release Date: 18.06.03