Nepal, June 11 -- Facing the House of Representatives for the first time since assuming office, Prime Minister Balendra Shah revealed something startling. He told lawmakers that he had only recently learned that Nepal and India faced border complications extending beyond Nepal's own territorial claims.

Nepal's Foreign Ministry scrambled within hours to clarify that the Prime Minister was referring to cross-border holding in no-man's land, the Dasgaja strip, and not to any sovereign territorial concession. The clarification was technically defensible. The damage, politically and diplomatically, was not so easily undone.

This was not a gaffe. It was a symptom.

Tzvetan Todorov, drawing on the 12th-century theologian Hugh of St. Victor, on...