Borders to not exist in space. Borders do not exist on land or sea. Borders only exist within the collective mind of Man. People came before the borders. The land came before the borders. Rivers can serve as borders but they are just rivers. Mountains and lakes can be used as borders, but they still are just mountains and lakes. Their meaning and invention to be used as borders is humanities recent creation, supposedly if not to let the bloodshed over lands end, as if any set of nations ever really wanted to commit at all to that, then to give it pause for awhile.

             People are territorial. They like to move into an area and mark off all they find in that area as their own. The strongest in that area will eliminate or subjugate the weaker, or the weaker, if they survive, will move on to another area to be repeated, one way or another somewhere else. Borders give a pause to that. They say you can have that over there, but this over here belongs to us. At its simplest, it is a line in the sand. If you cross that line without our permission, we can kill you, enslave you, imprison you, or sell you back to your own people.

             But that line did not used to be a literal line. There were usually buffer-zones, no man's lands, or groups of lesser powerful peoples between to keep warring factions apart where trade could flourish. Such zones when populated, blurred the distinctions between the groups gradually across space with people often belonging neither to one group or another but to a mixture of both, or to neither. Borders shift, most often due to wars, and these middle groups are often traded as the spoils of war, first to one side, then to another.

             All of Eastern European countries have experienced these shifts and even the entire region itself was considered a buffer-zone between the West and Russia. Some of the states in the region are new, less than one hundred years old, so their borders are new, but the people, like the rivers and streams, hills and lakes which define their new borders, have been there much longer.

             Go back far enough, and no one belonged to anyone else. People just were. They may have spoken similar languages, they may have spoken different ones or the same language. They may have gotten along with each other or often fought each other, but as distinct groups emerged, they went long periods in time back from the present side by side without completely wiping each other out. They worked out a common border space between their groups or they would not have survived to this day as separate groups, languages, or ethnicities.

             But more recently what we term civilization brought about the Age of Empires and all of these smaller groups got merged into larger empires with other people whose languages they did not speak and whose customs they did not share. The Baltic States, like many less populous peoples of Eastern Europe, lost their less-organized self-determination with the rise of Empires and often changed hands, belonging at different times to the German, Swedish, and Russian Empires, yet the people by and large never went anywhere. Like the rivers and streams, they were just there, same as usual, something to be reinterpreted or redefined by others, first belonging to one group, then to another.

             Closest to the present, the Baltics were part of the Russian Empire, and its people were part of the buffer-zone of influence between it and the Swedish and German Empires. For most of the last two hundred years, this was the situation, but the chance for these smaller new states; Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, to become independent came after World War I when the larger empires of Germany and Russia were in disarray from the war and rebellions.

             Now these lesser populous peoples got to decide for themselves where their borders were, where their lands ended and where others' lands began. Who was "them" vs. who was "us". Language was the key defining factor and borders were worked out between themselves largely along provinces defined earlier when they were a part of Russia. Such borders were not important for long because within a generation they were occupied again by both Germany, then by Russia again. Within the same country once again, the borders between themselves, between them and between the rest of Russia, were not as important and people could traverse those borders freely, to whatever extent one could describe movement within the Soviet Union as "freely". Towns grew naturally uninhibited by these borders which existed on paper but less within the minds of men. They did not interfere as much with human movement or trade.

             After regaining independence in 1991, the borders once again became a big deal. Towns were cut in two, and many people needed visas to go to work or to visit relatives only a few miles down the road. Who was affected by this differed according to which way the border went, namely, which state was on the other side of the border. While at first people cold still move freely in all directions, a new East/West wall was forming between them and Russia due to their integration into the European Union.  Once again, as before they could travel freely between their countries and other Baltic states and within the new block they were now a part of, but not any longer to and from Russia without visas. For most people in the Baltic states, this was a good trade. For others, it was merely once again being separated by or traded between larger empires they had no control over.

             Whether using the borders from the period between the World Wars or the previous internal borders within the Soviet Union, families were cut off from one another and large pockets of people who were culturally and linguistically different were left within each others borders.(1) When the border in question was between the Baltic states themselves, the problems were not major and eased drastically in joining the EU, but those with similar ties to the Russian side of the border, their situations worsened with EU membership.

             The Setu people along the southern border of Estonia and Pskov Oblast on the Russian side, are a typical border region group in that they traditionally defined and served as the border region separating two distinct larger groups, in this case, Estonians and Russians. The Setu themselves even see themselves "like a smooth transitional zone between two major cultures".(2)  The Setu people have long been defined as the border people between these groups with interweaving cultural ties between both groups, but distinct from both as well. They share a common language, though a distinct dialect that some might call a unique language,(3) with the Estonians to the north and west. Their religion is Russian Orthodox like their neighboring Russians to the east, though that too has some unique differences that set it apart as well. When the time came to enforce a strict border between Russian and the new soon-to-be EU border state of Estonia, the Setu people found themselves cut in two.

             Whereas the Setus see themselves as distinct group apart from the Estonians, there has been a drive by Estonia to "integrate" them into the Estonian culture, and indeed there has been more pressure for them to assimilate into Estonian culture than for those to integrate into the Russian culture on the Russian side.(4)  On the Russian side in Pskov, though not as directly targeted, the Setus are caught between two cultures war of rhetoric, of growing hostility toward the Estonians in general, and rising nationalism growing within Russia, especially in border regions such as Pskov Oblast.(5)  The very process of nation-building endangers the fragile state of such mixed culture border peoples, forcing them to choose one sense of identity over another or to be assimilated by whatever side of the line they find themselves on once divvied up to be melded into that nation's sense of national identity.

             As I began, borders exist within the minds of men. Rivers are rivers, mountains are mountains, lakes are lakes, people are people. One day it is decided they belong to this group, one day they are said to belong to another. What and who are the dividing lines as well as what the groups are called and what they identify themselves by inevitably changes over time. Borders are mental constructs enforced at the point of a gun. Given control of education, if a subset is large enough, they can still see themselves as an individual people and conform to the new borders. Russians in Estonia and Latvia can be convinced they are a separate group than Russians in Russia, and can survive as a separate group culturally speaking because they have hundreds of thousands of members. (They can be Hyphen-Peoples: Estonian-Russians, Latvian-Russians) With the Setu people, such invented distinctions based on new borders only further endanger a distinct people and culture that was teetering on the edge of extinction anyway. For them, with fewer than 20,000 members in total,(6)  they cannot afford by numbers to be broken up into more sub-categories; Estonian-Setus vs. Pskov or Russian-Setus.

             Because borders are just concepts, what they mean is evolving and changing, as concepts do over time. The no man's lands, the buffer-zone border peoples, are all vanishing and borders are being defined down to the square foot. Yet they, the borders, can disappear just as easily or become less important as when they were parts of larger empires, or now as parts of the EU. The territorialism of early groups of humans is still as visceral as ever, yet the borders within empires are not the sharp knives or deadly lines in the sand as borders between empires. Therefore the goal for states which themselves used to be buffer-zones ought to be to try to find a balance between the inclusionary growth of joining larger confederations without sacrificing ties and building exclusionary zones around themselves toward others. It is too bad all people cannot see themselves as border peoples as well with all other groups as concentric circles of differences away from wherever they are, and no one direction any more relevant than any other.