The New Agenda for Peace Research by Hon-Won Jeong

Author:Hon-Won Jeong [Jeong, Hon-Won]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General
ISBN: 9780429806964
Google: 2TeDDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-01-04T03:45:13+00:00

Moments of State Creation

Membership in the existing club of nation states is only revised at moments of far-reaching international change wherein it is practically and normatively possible to challenge and overcome the previous territorial status quo. As already intimated, the membership of nations in the international club of states was redefined on three occasions in the 20th century: after the First World War, after the Second World War, and after the Cold War. On each of these occasions, new states were formed out of defeated, discredited or disintegrated multinational empires whose lands were comparatively easy to parcel out to new or reborn states because existing borders failed to satisfy the normative criterion of selfdetermination.

Even under these circumstances, a prior concern for international order as reflected in the territorial integrity of existing states meant that such claims for independence were only successful in a limited range of cases: highest level constituent units of empires or federal states which were dissolved in keeping with the principle of uti posseditis juris or respect for frontiers existing at the moment of independence; territories where self-determination was applied by plebiscite; mandated or trust territories; and formerly independent territories that reasserted their independence with at least the tacit consent of the state affected (Kingsbury, 1992, p. 487).

From 1919 to 1920, new states were created in Central and Eastern Europe out of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ottoman Empire, and Prussian Kingdom. There emerged a dozen new or enlarged states all of which claimed legitimacy on grounds of ethnonational identity, often as determined by plebiscite: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. Added to these were Finland and the Baltic States, which emerged out of the disintegrating Russian Empire: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Significantly, however, the principle of national self-determination was, in practice, confined to Europe. Although the victorious Entente Powers (particularly Britain and France) were grudgingly prepared to accept the notion that European peoples had a right to self-determination -- though here, too, a certain hesitation was evident as in Britain’s unwillingness to grant full self-determination to the Irish — they were unwilling to extend this right to their colonial subjects and territories.

It was not until after the Second World War that new, often multiethnic states were created out of the European colonies in Asia and Africa, the majority of which followed pre-existing colonial frontiers. The post-1945 determination to preclude secession and irredentism was by and large successful. Some successor states did manage to expand their post-independence borders beyond the pre-existing colonial frontiers — e.g., India annexed Goa (which was still a colony at the time); Indonesia annexed West Irian and East Timor (the latter, of course, is not widely recognised); and China annexed Tibet (which had an historic dependent relationship with China). But most irredentist claims — e.g., Spain to Gibraltar, the Philippines to Sabah, Morocco to Mauritania, the Republic of Ireland to Ulster, the Argentine to the Falklands, and Taiwan to the Chinese Mainland — remained unsuccessful (Mayall, 1998, pp. 910). Similarly, of

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