National Borders are Not Going Away

A great songwriter once asked us to imagine a world without countries. Could our societies ever willingly eliminate their borders and come together as one?

All evidence indicates the dreamer John Lennon had been imagining the unattainable. Certainly, among other species, fusion of healthy societies is vanishingly rare. Chimpanzee societies, called communities, exemplify this: the only “mergers” strain that word’s meaning. Primatologist Frans de Waal tells me that captive chimps from different sources can be integrated into one community, but such a merger is a nightmare for zookeepers that requires months of careful introductions, with bloody skirmishes along the way. Meanwhile, the bonobo, an easygoing relative of the more xenophobic chimp, has an aptitude for befriending strangers. That allows individuals who have not met before to forge a new community from scratch with comparatively little fuss. Yet in both apes such arrang­ed societies are artifacts of confinement where, with the original community lost to them, the occupants have no choice but to get along. In nature even bonobo communities that have formed tight social bonds keep their collective memberships unwaveringly separate. After a time spent socializing with their neighbors, bonobo communities go back to their own territories.

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