Author's Introduction
- We live in a world where less and less seems to be universally agreed on, but there is one important exception. Virtually all national governments, either implicitly or explicitly, agree that respect for the ‘sovereignty and territorial integrity’ of other nation-states is a fundamental principle of the international community. According to the United Nations Charter ratified in 1945, states are committed to refraining ‘from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.’ (Note that in this essay I use the term ‘state’ rather than the more ambiguous terms ‘nation’ or ‘country’. This does not refer to the subordinate political units such individual states within the United States). It is rare to find anyone who will openly support the idea that annexing territory from another state, after forcibly conquering it, could be legitimate. Conquest exists, of course, but it is almost always disguised as something else, whether it is Russia’s technique of promoting the secession of neighbouring regions, and then annexing them after holding a referendum, or Israel’s technique of calling it an occupation rather than a conquest.
- Political leaders today take pride in rejecting conquest as illegitimate, which makes our current international order seem civilised and peace-loving. What could possibly justify taking by force territory that is not one’s own? But the idea that conquest is never legitimate and acceptable in international affairs is relatively new. As the 17th-century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius argued, treaties that end wars should be honoured, even if they forcibly impose unjust conditions, for example by taking away part of a state’s territory. Such treaties, even if unjust, may sometimes be the only way to end wars, and rejecting them on principle would merely make it impossible for wars to end. Moreover, as the 19th-century American jurist Henry Wheaton observed: ‘The title of almost all the nations of Europe to the territory now possessed by them … was originally derived from conquest, which has been subsequently confirmed by long possession.’ The very existence of almost any state, from this perspective, seems to depend, inevitably, on the legitimacy of conquest.
- But instead of Grotius’s law of nations, which attempts to limit conquest by allowing it a regulated path to legality, we have an international order that guarantees as an absolute right the territory of each state as it currently exists. What is banned is not profiting from conquest as such, but only profiting from conquest that took place after about 1945, or even more recently in the case of conquests against colonial empires by emerging independent states. Apparently, the conquests that happened before a certain point in history are completely legitimate, but now conquest is one of the worst crimes imaginable.
- How did we come to have an international order that is so radically protective of the status quo?
Author's Conclusion
- This narrow interpretation of conquest has been revived many times since, but perhaps most importantly during the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US and its coalition partners. In the lead-up to the invasion and its aftermath, the US president George W Bush and the UK prime minister Tony Blair emphasised their respect for Iraq’s territorial integrity, meaning not that they wouldn’t use conquest to gain control over the country – this they did with a spectacular show of force – but that they would not alter its borders. Upholding the sanctity of territorial integrity and interstate borders, they hoped, would signal a regard for international order that would make up for their refusal to act multilaterally and through consultation with the UN Security Council in invading Iraq.
- The narrow interpretation of territorial integrity strictly as a rule against annexation of conquered territory is the one that stands to lose the most from recent annexations by Russia and Israel. It is not that every contested border around the world will suddenly be up for grabs, with military aggression breaking out in every corner of the globe. Almost all states frequently repeat support for the principle of territorial integrity in response to events where it appears threatened. Even if Iran and China did not participate in the UN General Assembly vote to condemn Russia for its invasion, they still affirmed the territorial integrity of all the relevant states. While the US may have been at the forefront of the abolition of conquest, there are too many other states in the world that are keen to protect their own borders for territorial integrity to be simply forgotten. But according to the analyst Bonny Lin writing in Foreign Affairs in 2023: ‘Some Chinese scholars have suggested that sovereignty and territorial integrity should be viewed as only one of 12 core principles for China to balance – in other words, not the most important one, or a value that needs to be respected completely.’ Annexation-by-conquest may remain illegal but may also decline in its perceived gravity, relative to other kinds of violations of a country’s territory.
- International orders come and go. Before the territorial integrity principle, there was a different system, in European states and their colonies, in which conquest was regulated by norms and principles but not explicitly illegal. And change will come again to the international order. Shifts in relative power between different social and political forces in the world, with different cultural and moral practices, make this all but inevitable. What comes next is impossible to predict with certainty, but it is becoming less and less likely that attitudes towards conquest will be shaped by the ideological constructs of the US.
Author Narrative
- Kerry Goettlich is a lecturer in international security in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading, UK.
Notes
- This is a useful Paper, especially in the present geopolitical climate.
- It's useful to have the background on just why the retention of international borders is deemed to be so important. It's also good to see the US getting the blame for something.
- Whether the 'Open Doors' policy of the US - to provide free access for the US to trade in relatively stable countries - is correct is - I suppose - moot. But I'm sympathetic to the idea. The US was against 'hard' empires because they got in the way of their 'soft' empire.
- The US master plan is supposed to be to interfere in countries - by military and other means - as much as is needed to keep the doors open. All the while keeping borders fixed even though the governments may be replaced.
- It seems to me that most wars these days arise from badly-drawn 'lines in the sand' that collapsing empires came up with in their haste to disengage. These act like the fault-lines between techtonic plates. Where they have been drawn wrongly, one side wants to keep the territory they have unfairly gained and wants to get back the territory it has lost. Or, one 'people' wants to be united across artificial boundaries.
- There are some useful Aeon Comments, with replies by the author.
- I suppose this Paper is rather losely related to my Note on Narrative Identity.
Comment:
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