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country of origin. The difficult process of laying down new roots in an acquired home-land also turned immigrants into patriots, and even if the process was not always successful in the first generation, the new homeland inevitably struck deep roots within the hearts and minds of subsequent generations.

      Throughout history, political phenomena emerge and ultimately vanish. The national homeland that started to take form in the late eighteenth century and turned into the “normal” and normative space of all those who became its citizens began to show the first signs of exhaustion at the end of the twentieth century. The phenomenon is, of course, still far from disappearing, and in “remote” corners of the globe people are still dying for tracts of national land. In other regions, however, traditional borders are already starting to dissolve.

      The market economy that long ago demolished the small home-land and played an important role in constructing national homelands and delineating them within impenetrable borders has begun to partially erode its own previous creations, aided in this effort by the political elite and, to a greater extent, audiovisual and online media. The decline in value of agricultural cultivation as a means for creating economic wealth has also helped weaken the psychological power of the patriotism of the past. Today when Frenchmen, Germans, or Italians leave their homeland, neither the state nor its watchdogs are present at the border. Europeans now move within territorial spaces that have adopted completely new boundaries.

      Verdun, which may be a symbol of the folly of twentieth-century patriotism, has become a popular tourist site. Ironically, today at Verdun no notice is taken of the passports or national identities of the Europeans who visit it. Although Europe’s newly ordained land borders are undoubtedly steeper and at times no less brutal than the previous ones, the territories that lie within them no longer possess all the attributes of the old political homelands.

      Frenchmen will apparently never again die for France, and Germans will most likely never again kill for Germany (or vice-versa). The Italians, on their part, will most likely continue the tradition embodied in the rant by the cynical elderly Italian man from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 that appears as an epigraph at the beginning of the present chapter.

      Although conventional mass killing has become increasingly problematic and complicated in the nuclear age, we cannot rule out the possibility that humans will find new ways of killing and being killed in the future. If they do, however, most likely it will be for the sake of a new, and as yet unknown, version of politics.

1 “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” Horace, Odes 3.2 in Odes and Epodes, Cambridge: Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library), 2004, 144–5. These lines were written between 23 and 13 BCE. In its Zionist incarnation, the same sentiment was articulated using the words “It is good to die for our country,” which were attributed to Josef Trumpeldor, a pioneering Jewish settler who was killed in 1920 in a clash with local Arabs. As Trumpeldor had studied Latin in his younger years, he may have in fact quoted Horace just before his death.

2 On the relationship between the Russian term rodina and the German term heimat, see Peter Bickle, Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland, New York: Camden House, 2002, 2–3.

3 New York: Atheneum, 1970.

4 For more on this, see Geoffrey Gorer, “Ardrey on Human Nature: Animals, Nations, Imperatives,” in Ashley Montagu (ed.), Man and Aggression, London: Oxford University Press, 1973, 165–7.

5 Ardrey, Territorial Imperative, 5.

6 Ibid., 6–7.

7 Quoted in David Thomas Murphy, The Heroic Earth: Geopolitical Thought in Weimar Germany, 1918–1933, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997, 9.

8 For more on Haushofer, see ibid., 106–10.

9 It took geopolitics quite some time to recover from its experience under Nazi rule, but by the 1970s it had already been reintroduced as a legitimate field of study. See David Newman, “Geopolitics Renaissant: Territory, Sovereignty and the World Political Map,” in David Newman (ed.), Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity, London: F. Cass, 1999, 1–5.

10 See especially Konrad Lorenz’s famous book On Aggression, London: Methuen, 1967.

11 On this subject, see John Hurrell Crook, “The Nature and function of territorial aggression,” in Montagu (ed.), Man and Aggression, 183–217.

12 Examples include Gaia, the primordial earth goddess of Greek mythology, and the Canaanite goddess Asherah.

13 For example, see Homer, The Iliad, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007, 5.212; 9.41, 46.

14 Aeschylus, The Persians, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981, 59. Herodotus’ The History also makes sparing use of the term, primarily to indicate place of origin. See, for example, Herodotus, The History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 3.140, 4.76.

15 See, for example, Sophocles, Antigone, ll. 183, 200. and Euripides, Medea, ll. 34, 797ff.

16 Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, 6.69.

17 Ibid., 2.34–46. The Stoic school sometimes employed the term “homeland” to refer to the entire cosmos. In addition, although Greece was never recognized as a homeland, some educated Hellenes possessed a consciousness of shared cultural identity that stemmed from “shared blood” or linguistic and ritual similarity. For example, see Herodotus, The Histories, 8.144, and the famous words of Isocrates in Panegyricus 50.

18 Plato, The Trial and Death of Socrates: Four Dialogues, trans. Benjamin Jowett, New York: Dover Publications, 1992, 51.

19 On the complex relationship between autochthonism and politics in Athens, see the articles in Nicole Loraux’s fascinating book Né de la terre. Mythe et politique à Athènes, Paris: Seuil, 1996, and also Marcel Detienne, Comment être autochtone, Paris: Seuil, 2003, 19–59. On the Spartans’ startling concept of space and their unique attitude toward ancestral land, see Irad Malkin, Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

20 Gaius Sallustius Crispus, The Catiline Conspiracy, 58.

21 Cicero, The Catiline Conspiracy, Oration 4.7, in William Duncan, Cicero’s Select Orations Translated into English,

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