Societies mobilize around possession of territory

The argument

This argument works backwards from behaviour to foundations. The foundations of any society can be identified by the society's ability to mobilize and unite in defense of those shared foundations — the reasoning being that a society reveals what it is actually built on by what it will act collectively to protect. Stated commitments are cheap; mobilisation is costly, and so is diagnostic. Applying that test, the argument finds one answer recurring. In most societies, the defense of a shared territory is the most unifying and mobilizing force available. No other appeal reliably produces the same response: members of a society will put aside any other difference — of class, religion, politics, or language — to protect a particular geographic area. Differences that ordinarily organise a society's internal conflicts are suspended when the territory itself is threatened, which suggests those differences sit above something more fundamental rather than constituting it. That pattern is what the argument treats as evidence. If territory is what a society will defend when everything else is set aside, then territory is the element on which the rest depends. It is reasonable to conclude, on this reading, that it is this shared territory that connects all the elements of a society and provides the cohesion on which everything else is founded — the institutions, the culture, and the shared life all presupposing a place in which they occur. Other candidate foundations fail the same test, since a society divided over religion or ideology still mobilises as one when its land is at stake. Because the strongest and most reliable collective action a society takes is in defence of its territory, this argument concludes that society is fundamentally a shared territory.

Context

One of the most powerful unifying forces in a society is the shared defense of a territory.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The fact that societies mobilize around the protection of a specific territory is not the same as asserting that a society is defined by its shared territory. A territory and a society are entirely different entities, but they have a close relationship. A territory is the natural result of the process of forming a society, but it is not an integral part of the society. If a society is de-terrorialized, is robbed of its land and forced to move, does that society become extinct? The answer is evidently no. That society may become nomadic, take another territory, or become a diaspora elsewhere, but it survives in its existing form. This would suggest that while societies have a close relationship to their territory, they are not reducible to the possession of that territory.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] Just because a territory is important to a society, doesn't mean it defines it.

Framing

The importance of something can be identified by how determined somebody is to protect it. Nothing unifies and mobilizes a society as much as a threat to its territory. This indicates the central role a shared territory plays in the formation and shaping of a society.