Borderlands Syndrome–the rabid nationalism of non-native sons

One unifying biographical factor in the lives of Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler is what some historians have termed “borderland syndrome”—they were born and raised on the outer fringes of the nation they ultimately ruled. France’s Napoleon was Italian, Russia’s Stalin was Georgian, and Germany’s Hitler was Austrian. Yet something about their childhood experiences living on the borders of greater empires, and becoming non-native sons of these greater empires, turned them into driven men. And ultimately, each was taken by a fanatical and irrational patriotism which drove them to conquer and dominate other nations and peoples.

Consider:

• Napoleone di Buonaparte was born in Corsica the year after rule of the island was transferred from Genoa to France. Although his family was Italian (he was named after an uncle killed fighting the French) his family quickly adapted to the new order and his father was named Corsica’s representative to the court of Louis XVI in 1777. As a teenager Napoleon enrolled at a religious school in mainland France to learn French, attended a French military academy, but never became a native speaker and spoke with a Corsican accent for his entire life. This notwithstanding, he wanted to be French and identified with the institutions of France and pushed to assimilate through the meritocracy that was the 19th century military. Most telling, he changed his name from the Italian Napoleone di Buonaparte to Napoléon Bonaparte.

• Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili was born to a cobbler in the violent and lawless town of Gori in a Georgia that was under the rule of the Russian Czar. At age 10 he began attending a church school where the Georgian children were forced to speak Russian. He attended Orthodox seminary, from where he was expelled, and then became a Marxist revolutionary after reading the works of Lenin. He later took the name Joseph Stalin, and distinguished himself as a full-blown outlaw in the Caucasus, robbing banks and organizing the various peoples of the Caucasus, including Azeris and Persians, in violent Bolshevik activities.

• Adolf Hitler was born in western Austria at Braunau, the river that separates Germany from Austria. His father was a customs inspector who commuted back and forth across the riverine border every day. His family soon moved to Bavaria, and Lower Bavarian became his lifelong native dialect. But his family originated from, and he later returned to, an “ancestral homeland” (as the local Nazis later proudly called it) two hundred miles east of Braunau in the Waldviertel, a place for centuries the disputed borderland between Austria and Czechoslovakia. And the name Hitler is not a typical German name and may be Slavic in origin (and less likely, but still possible, Jewish in origin).

Something about living in the borderland for each of these men was that it gave them a kind of charismatic political genius. They came from outside, or at least the edges, of the nation that they led. All three men rose to power through the military or through a political party organ. And all inspired their countrymen with a fiery vision that, while idealistic in some ways and perverse in others, resulted in undisputed authority to lead the nation. Once installed as rulers, all ordered military campaigns to expand their territory and spheres of influence.

These three men are the most frequently cited examples of “Borderlands Syndrome,” but there are others, and from all spectrums of human history—Alexander the Great, Theodor Herzl, and Sun Yat Sen, among others.