Frontiers E-Book

Malcolm Anderson

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 487

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The purpose and location of frontiers affect all human societies in the contemporary world - this book offers an introduction to them and the issues they raise.

Leseprobe

Frontiers

Territory and State Formation in the Modern World

Malcolm Anderson

Polity Press

Copyright © Malcolm Anderson 1996

The right of Malcolm Anderson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1996 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

First published in paperback 1997.

Reprinted 2004

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge, CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-0-7456-6560-3 (Multi-user ebook)

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and has been applied for from the Library of Congress.

Typeset in Times 10 on 12 pt by CentraCet Ltd, Cambridge

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Marston Book Services Limited, Oxford

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

For more information on Polity visit our website:www.polity.co.uk

Contents

List of Maps

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 The International Frontier in Historical and Theoretical Perspective

2 Self-Determination, Secession and Autonomy: European Cases of Boundary-Drawing

3 Themes in African and Asian Frontier Disputes

4 Boundaries within States: Size, Democracy and Service Provision

5 Frontiers and Migration

6 Uninhabited Zones and International Cooperation

Conclusion: The European Union and the Future of Frontiers

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Maps

1 Roman administrative areas in Gaul

2 The Roman empire at its greatest extent, showing main fortified lines

3 The expansion of French territory

4 South Tyrol

5. Jura and the canton of Berne

6 Population changes in Northern Ireland

7 New frontiers in central and eastern Europe after 1989

8 Germany in 1937, 1943, 1951–89 and 1990

9 Poland’s 1920 and 1945 frontiers

10 Ethnic composition of the states of former Yugoslavia

11 Russia and neighbouring states after the break-up of the USSR

12 Africa: topographical, geometric and ‘human’ boundaries

13 (a) The Aozou Strip; (b) the western Sahara; (c) the Horn of Africa

14 Areas seized by Russia through the ‘unequal’ treaties

15 The Himalayan frontier between India and China

16 The Kurile Islands

17 The Indian sub-continent

18 Iraq’s south-eastern frontiers

19 (a) Changes in Israeli territory 1975–93; (b) an Israeli view of the future

20 Existing territorial claims in Antarctica

21 The Aegean Sea

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Nigel Bowles, Eberhard Bort, François Crouzet, Desmond King and Jacqueline Larrieu who read the whole manuscript and offered many useful and stimulating comments. Richard Bellamy, Pierre Birnbaum, Mary Buckley and Anthony Cohen read parts of the text and saved me from egregious errors. The mistakes which remain are entirely my own responsibility.

Nicola Exley of the Reprographics Unit of the University of Edinburgh drew the maps, for which I am grateful.

Material support from the University of Edinburgh, especially of sabbatical leave, and the Economic and Social Research Council (a grant awarded for another project indirectly contributed to the writing of this book) have eased my task. I am grateful to the University of Edinburgh and the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris for the use of their facilities. Personal support from colleagues in Edinburgh, Oxford and Paris kept at bay the lassitude which accompanies projects picked up and put down as a result of many interruptions, imposed and self-imposed.

To

Jacqueline

Introduction

All political authorities and jurisdictions have physical limits – a characteristic often regarded as so obvious that it does not warrant further comment. But where the limits are located, and the purposes they serve, influence the lives of all people separated by frontiers. Contemporary frontiers are not simply lines on maps, the unproblematic givens of political life, where one jurisdiction or political authority ends and another begins; they are central to understanding political life. Examining the justifications of frontiers raises crucial, often dramatic, questions concerning citizenship, identity, political loyalty, exclusion, inclusion and of the ends of the state. The general impact of frontiers1 is rarely analysed by historians and social scientists.2 This book attempts to fill a gap by specifying the nature of frontiers in the increasingly filled-up and fast-changing world of the late twentieth century.3 A vast historical and philosophical background to this subject exists. The first step in the enquiry is to suggest a definition of frontiers.

Frontiers between states are institutions and processes. As institutions they are established by political decisions and regulated by legal texts. The frontier is the basic political institution: no rule-bound economic, social or political life in complex societies could be organized without them.4 The questions, which have troubled philosophers since antiquity about all institutions may be asked about frontiers.5 Are they needed? How can they be justified? The answers vary in different historical periods; different kinds of frontier existed before the modern state, and other kinds will emerge after its demise. The linear and exclusive state frontier, in the sense currently understood, scarcely existed before the French Revolution. Since then the frontier has defined, in a legal sense, a sovereign authority; the identity of individuals (claims to nationality and exercise of rights of citizenship) are delimited by it. But this particular form of frontier is not part of an immutable natural order and signs of a radical change in perceptions of frontiers are now apparent.

Frontiers as processes have four dimensions. First, frontiers are instruments of state policy because governments attempt to change, to their own advantage, the location and the functions of frontiers. Although there is no simple relationship between frontiers and inequalities of wealth and power, government policy on frontiers is intended to protect and to promote interests. Second, the policies and practices of governments are constrained by the degree of de facto control which they have over the state frontier. The claim of the modern state to be ‘the sole, exclusive fount of all powers and prerogatives of rule’6 could only be realized if its frontiers were made impermeable to unwanted external influences. The incapacity of governments in the contemporary world to control much of the traffic of persons, goods and information across their frontiers is changing the nature of states.

Third, frontiers are markers of identity, in the twentieth century usually national identity, although political identities may be larger or smaller than the ‘nation’ state. Frontiers, in this sense, are part of political beliefs and myths about the unity of the people, and sometimes myths about the ‘natural’ unity of a territory. These ‘imagined communities’, to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase concerning nations,7 are now a universal phenomenon and often have deep historical roots. They are linked to the most powerful form of ideological bonding in the modern world – nationalism. Other, usually weaker and less cohesive, imagined communities may transcend the confines of the state; myths of regional, continental and hemispheric unity have also marked boundaries between friend and foe.8 But myths of unity can be created or transformed with remarkable rapidity during wars, revolutions and political upheavals.

Fourth, the ‘frontier’ is a term of discourse. Meanings are given both to frontiers in general and to particular frontiers, and these meanings change from time to time. ‘Frontier’ is a term used in law, diplomacy and politics, and its meaning varies according to the context. In the scholarly writings in anthropology, history, political science, public international law and sociology, it also has different meanings according to the theoretical approach adopted. Sometimes scholarship is the servant of political power and nationalist movements when frontiers are in dispute;9 at other times it is part of the scarcely heard disquisition of the lecture hall. The term ‘frontier’ for people who live in frontier regions, or those whose daily life is directly affected by frontiers, is associated with the rules imposed by frontiers, and with popular images of the frontier as either ‘barrier’ or ‘junction’.10 What frontiers represent is constantly reconstituted by those human beings who are regulated, influenced and limited by them. The layers of discourse – political, scholarly, popular – always overlap; divergent mental images of frontiers are an integral part of frontiers as processes.11

Attitudes towards Frontiers

Emotions aroused by state frontiers became more widely shared and obsessive with the sacralization of homelands by nineteenth-century nationalism. Frontiers became associated with powerful images, symbols and (sometimes invented) traditions. The Italian sociologist Raimondo Strassoldo has reviewed the symbolic, psychological and sociological significance of frontiers.12 They have a powerful hold on the imagination; many literary allusions are made to border crossing, to the passing of the frontier in terms of exile, danger and the discarding of rules, conventions and inhibitions.13

All frontiers have a psychological component14 – indeed, some psychologists argue that each individual has a concept of bounded personal space.15 Intrusion into this personal space, without invitation or consent, provokes emotional reactions of anxiety or hostility.16 Governments show similar sensitivity to unregulated intrusions across frontiers, and to threats, real or imagined, to the territorial integrity of the state. In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, during the great age of the nation-state in Europe, large populations and mass political movements came to share this sensitivity. Visual images of natural frontiers or approximate shapes – the boot of Italy, the islands of Britain and the face of France17 – reinforced this view and were integrated into the sense of national identity. Feelings of violation were experienced at the threat of alienation of any part of this image of the motherland.

These feelings spread to states in the Third World, partly through the conduit of the educational systems established by the imperial powers and partly because indigenous nationalist movements required new mobilizing ideologies to unite disparate peoples. According to Lamb, writing about Asian frontiers after the end of the colonial period, the change in status from colony to fully independent state had profound consequences; the frontier was transformed into the ‘cell wall of the basic unit of national identity’, marking an emotional and psychological divide as well as a political–geographical line.18 Any threat to the new frontier provoked a prickly nationalistic response. Thus, independent India reacted emotionally and with incomprehension to Chinese claims for territory on its northern frontier in the 1950s, in a manner quite different to the British imperial proconsuls (who had established the frontier), for whom frontier policy was part of a ‘great game’.

The passions engendered by the nation-state are not necessarily a permanent feature of political life. Attitudes towards frontiers in the highly industrialized countries, and particularly in Europe, are once again changing. Instantaneous transfrontier communication of information and frontier crossings by individuals, annually numbering more than the total population of these countries, have transformed the psychological and practical importance of frontier controls. Frontiers are still regarded as useful for defending cultures, rights and interests, but more flexible attitudes than in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War now prevail about how frontiers should be policed. Nine of the fifteen member states of the European Union have already agreed to dismantle police controls at the frontiers between them.

Boundaries Defining Identities

In certain circumstances the frontier acquired a mythic significance in building nations and political identities, becoming the mythomoteur of a whole society. The pioneer frontier,19 which was a zone rather than a line, was central to North American society as myth, symbol and practical influence on social life in the nineteenth century and remains a powerful idea in the United States to the present day. The Castilian nation was created on the Iberian frontier between Islam and Christianity. The nature of the Russian sense of identity and Russian imperialism can be understood only by reference to the steppe experience, in which the Russians successfully defended themselves against invaders from the east, and developed a tragic sense of history.20

Although all human communities have, to a degree, defined themselves according to their self-perceived boundaries, these boundaries have sometimes been self-consciously created to promote a sense of distinctiveness and separateness. This occurs even in relatively rich industrialized societies. Marianne Heiberg, writing about the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, suggests that the Spanish Basques deliberately created an epistemic community in which people shared the same understanding of the political world: ‘Political parties, artistic production, amnesty organisations, historical research, economic enterprises, schools, newspapers, public projects, popular festivals, publishing houses, etc. were forced into categories of abertzale (patriotic)/españolista, nationalist/non-nationalist, Basque/anti-Basque. Through the insistent pressure of this polarisation, the boundaries demarcating the Basque nationalist community and its exclusive institutions became explicit, consolidated and impermeable.’21 But boundary-creating and maintaining mechanisms have usually come into being over much longer periods of time, the accumulated consequences of many individual actions and decisions, often directed towards other ends.22

State-building and a sense of territory have often gone hand in hand, but political identities have not always coincided with the frontiers of the modern sovereign state. Locality, social class, language, ethnicity, and religion have also been the basis of deeply rooted identities.23 A non-state boundary may be an enduring basis of identity; the characteristics of peoples without a state, the Basques or the Scots, the Ladins or (until recently) the Slovenes, may change over time while their geographical boundaries remain in the same place; other groups, such as Gypsies and Jews, have no geographically defined frontiers yet retain strong boundary-maintaining mechanisms. Distinctive human groups without states have come to be known as ‘minorities’. Pierre George suggests that there are three different types of minority: territorial minorities where a group has been associated for many generations with a particular area where it forms a majority of the population (Basques); minorities of the ghetto where enclaves are formed because of the reactions of the majority population (east European Jews prior to the Holocaust); and minorities without any specific geographical location which nonetheless retain strong communications networks (Gypsies).24 The ways boundaries are maintained vary between these three types of minority. But the existence of minorities has conflicted with the objective of creating a homogeneous national identity bounded by the frontiers of states.

States and Transfrontier Relations

In recent history, the inter-state frontier has been regarded as fundamentally different to other kinds of boundaries because of the doctrine of sovereignty and the territorial principle. The territorial exclusivity of the ‘nation’-state implied that there could be no intrusion by external jurisdictions and no political loyalties across the frontier. The people confined by a frontier were supposed to share a common fund of loyalties, values and characteristics. Exactly what these are may be vigorously and even violently disputed.

The more closed the frontier, the stronger has been its impact as a practical and symbolic threshold, the stronger rulers’ belief that strict control of the frontier was essential to the maintenance of their power. The Iron Curtain with its surveillance systems and automatic killing machines, the militarized frontier of Franco’s Spain, the imposed frontiers between Israel and its Arab neighbours, the 38th parallel separating the two Koreas, the unstable ceasefire line in Kashmir between India and Pakistan, the partition line separating Greek and Turkish Cyprus, the front line between Black Africa and the apartheid regime of South Africa and the frontier in the New Territories between Mao’s People’s Republic of China and the unfettered capitalism of Hong Kong are celebrated twentieth-century examples.

A pervasive, often almost superstitious, fear characterizes closed frontiers as lines of transition between two worlds – crossing them involves a passage to dangerous or forbidden lands; long residence on one side of the line requires a commitment to certain values and beliefs; those who pass regularly between the two worlds – such as Jews and Armenians between the Muslim and the Christian worlds for a millennium after the death of the Prophet, or private individuals who acted as intermediaries between east and west during the Cold War period – are admired, regarded as useful, but seen as deeply suspect. The completely closed frontier has always been an aspiration except for brief periods, during wars or other exceptional circumstances, it has scarcely existed. Transfrontier transactions and individual flight across the frontier occur despite the policies of authoritarian regimes.

Relations across twentieth-century international frontiers, between the populations which they separate, range along a continuum.25 At one extreme, populations are alienated from one another, exchanges across the frontier are kept to a minimum and violence always threatens. Moving along the spectrum from this extreme, relations may be those of coexistence with strict control of exchanges, easily interrupted without causing serious economic and social breakdown. Further along the spectrum, economically integrated frontier regions are found where disruption of the pattern of exchanges would involve major social and population change. At the other extreme, frontier zones are fully integrated: people speak the same languages, or mutually comprehensible ones, economic and social life has melded together so that a de facto merger takes place.

Conditions for integrated frontier regions may sometimes appear to exist, but merging does not inevitably follow. Open and easily crossed frontiers remain barriers for important purposes, such as for legal systems, taxation, access to public services, flags, teaching of history and much else besides. The Canada–US frontier, which has scarcely any security function, has a separating effect and, as Beaujeu-Garnier and Chabod write about a particularly peaceful (although for a long time fortified) frontier, ‘technical change has effaced physical barriers’ but ‘on the Franco-Swiss border the towns turn their backs on each other … and face their respective countries’.26 In the European Union, local and regional authorities now participate in transfrontier associations but some of these promote genuine joint activities while others do not.

In general, in the highly developed regions of the world, the frontiers of the nation-state have become more permeable and less clearly defined as the defensive lines of cultural and social identities.27 New territorial questions have emerged in the late twentieth century. What purposes will frontiers serve between the member states of the European Union after the abolition of systematic frontier controls? Will the external frontier of the European Community become the equivalent of a state frontier encouraging the growth of a ‘European nationalism’? What will be the resolution of shifting frontiers in the cataclysmic changes which in 1989 convulsed eastern Europe and subsequently the former Soviet Union; how long will frontiers in Africa and the Middle East survive in the midst of the economic, social, religious and political tensions in these regions? Will new continental groupings try to use frontiers in ways designed to improve their competitive position? In what ways will political frontiers adapt to new economic and demographic conditions? Will new technologies, bringing economic and social change in their wake, revolutionize attitudes towards territory and frontiers?

A speculative question underlying these others is whether other boundaries will become relatively more important than state frontiers in defining personal and group identity. The anthropologist Anthony Cohen has suggested: ‘Where cultural difference was formerly underpinned also by structural boundaries, these have now given way to boundaries which inhere in the mind: symbolic boundaries. This transformation constitutes an important qualification to concepts of mass society, and has been manifest in the widespread assertion of sectional identities in the last twenty years.’28 A process of delocalization of boundaries of identity may now be under way. More and more people are, like the ‘wandering Jew’, carrying their identity around with them.

Justification of Frontiers

What human purposes do frontiers serve? The question cannot be answered ‘scientifically’, in a neutral way. Frontiers are the limits of permissible behaviour but these limits are necessarily perceived in very different ways by different people. Evaluations of frontiers vary, ranging from regarding them as essential and precious protection, to accepting them as a fact of life, to considering them as tiresome and arbitrary constraints. Liberal pacifists have condemned them as the instruments for turning into enemies those who would prefer to live in harmony, and helping to maintain ancient hostilities when the causes for them have disappeared. Others in the liberal tradition have thought that clearly defined frontiers are essential for ordered, constitutional politics, the preservation of citizenship rights and the maintenance of community.

Liberals and Marxists may agree that boundaries are made and manipulated in order to ensure a certain distribution of power. But many Marxists, believing in the primacy of class struggle over any other form of conflict, contend that frontiers are transitory instruments for upholding particular forms of class domination. Without frontiers, conservatives and liberals concur, politics would be inconceivable; international relations in the current sense would disappear. The concept of the political, according to one famous argument by Carl Schmitt, is unintelligible without the notions of friend and foe, and therefore boundaries between them.29 In addition to these familiar arguments, non-European traditions30 have been incompatible with dominant European and American thinking: for Muslims historically, the external frontier of the Muslim world is a temporary truce line and the internal frontiers of Islam have no sound Koranic basis; in the Chinese classical tradition the only legitimate frontiers were those unilaterally imposed by the Chinese themselves.

But the western liberal view is the most influential in contemporary world politics, because the body of thought which can broadly be described as liberalism31 has dominated constitutional thinking in nearly all of the highly industrialized countries, and has permeated international institutions and international law. Liberalism is a universal doctrine which attributes, in principle, equal rights and justice to all human beings. But universal notions of rights and justice are too abstract and too general for the purpose of deriving enforceable rules about who owes what to whom and in what circumstances. For this purpose a geographically bounded state is required. But liberalism offers a notoriously poor account of the territorial state because it proposes no argument about basic questions – why have a multiplicity of states, or why belong to one state rather than another?32

Vagueness and ambiguity characterize the liberal position on frontiers. Liberalism simply assumes, as a given, the existence of the territorial state, standing above civil society and regulating it. In the absence of a world state and universal liberalism, the territorially bounded state protects liberal values from internal and external enemies. But liberal universalism makes it potentially anti-pluralist, in that liberals tend to argue that all individuals should be integrated into a uniform liberal order – strong group identities and loyalties conflict with this position. Also, the practicalities of implementing liberal notions of equal liberties, equal opportunities and distributive justice make frontiers essential. For example, John Rawls argues33 that policies should be pursued to promote equality, provided that these policies do not make the least favoured members of society worse off. Whether this is a tolerable principle without a strictly delimited state is doubtful because the sense of responsibility for the great majority of people does not extend to the whole of mankind and tends to diminish with social and geographical distance.

Attempts to popularize ideas of ‘duties beyond borders’34 extending outside groupings of like-minded states at comparable stages of economic development have not made much progress in large sections of opinion in any country. Some political theorists argue that the sphere of justice remains bounded by the frontier of a state.35 In a morally pluralistic world, the argument runs, the state must be the final arbitrator of what is just and unjust. How frontiers are justified, and for what purposes, relate to these conceptions of spheres of justice.36

There is a preliminary matter of vocabulary: three words are in common use – ‘frontier’, ‘boundary’ and ‘border’ – and a fourth, now archaic, term – ‘march’ – which are applied to these outer limits. ‘Frontier’ is the word with the widest meaning, although its original meaning was military – the zone in which one faced the enemy. In contemporary usage, it can mean the precise line at which jurisdictions meet, usually demarcated and controlled by customs, police and military personnel. ‘Frontier’ can also refer to a region, as in the description of Alsace as the frontier region between France and Germany. In this sense it is the equivalent of the archaic ‘march’. Even more broadly, ‘frontier’ is used in specific cases to refer to the moving zone of settlement in the interior of a continent and was used in this sense in Turner’s famous classic, The Frontier in American History (Turner 1953). The term ‘border’ can be applied to a zone, usually a narrow one, or it can be the line of demarcation – the border between England and Scotland is both. It is the line running from the mouth of the Tweed to the Solway Firth, but in the plural it now refers to a Scottish region and, in the past, it was the ‘debatable lands’ where, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, neither the law of Scotland nor the law of England was enforced. The word ‘boundary’ is always used to refer to the line of delimitation or demarcation and is thus the narrowest of the three terms. English is not unusual in having more than one term; French also has four – frontière, front (exclusively military), limite, marche (archaic as in English) – with only the first normally being applied to the international frontier. Spanish has three – frontera, marca, limite – and German, alone among major European languages, has only one term in common use – Grenze.

In this book the term ‘frontier’ is normally used to refer to the international boundary with variations in particular cases as, for example, the border between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom Province of Northern Ireland; and ‘boundary’ is used to refer to the frontiers of political and administrative authorities below the state level. Prescott remarks that ‘there is no excuse for geographers using the terms “frontier” and “boundary” as synonymous’36 but this does not correspond to the ordinary language in the United Kingdom. By contrast, in the United States, ‘border’ is normally used to refer to the international frontier, because in American history ‘frontier’ referred to the zone mentioned above.

The Plan of this Book

This book treats a number of heterogeneous topics, united by the common theme that frontiers are inseparable from the entities which they enclose. The European origins and global spread of the sovereign state frontier are the subject of chapter 1. A specific conception of the frontier originated in the violent process of state formation in western Europe in the early modern period. Since then frontiers have marked the limit of an authority to rule, the sharp line at which sovereignty ran out. Wars were constantly fought to relocate frontiers and the nineteenth-century theorists sought to explain this competition; greater stability after 1950 stimulated a new set of theories.

The theme of chapter 2 is the changed basis of the legitimacy of frontiers. In traditional international law37 there are broadly three bases of entitlement to territory – historical rights, agreements between states (treaties) and effective occupation. But the legitimacy, as opposed to the legality, of frontiers has been increasingly based on the liberal conception of the right of self-determination, sometimes regarded as the basic human right.38 Aspects of the fragility of the territorial settlement in Africa and Asia are reviewed in chapter 3. Economic and social strains may not be contained by the existing frontiers, and European conceptions of frontiers may cease to be relevant in the quasi-sovereign states of the developing world.39

In western Europe there is a hierarchy of territorial units, ranging from regional groupings of states such as the European Community40 to territorial units below the state level. Chapter 4 contains a review of aspects of territorial relationships below the state level, including the establishment of transfrontier associations of local and regional governments which suggested a fraying at the edges of the states. Chapter 5 is concerned with a core function of contemporary state frontiers – the control of the movements of people. The desire to retain cultural homogeneity, apprehension that large-scale immigration can undermine the cohesion of society and reluctance to extend the rights and privileges of citizenship to a large number of incomers all play a role in restrictions on immigration.

Chapter 6 discusses the contentious issues which have emerged in the last thirty years about boundary-making in uninhabited areas. The development of international regimes for these spaces has the potential to affect legal doctrines concerning, and political attitudes towards, inhabited territories. In conclusion, the slogan ‘Europe without frontiers’ is examined. European developments are of more than local interest because regional integration is occurring in other parts of the world and they may offer pointers to the future of frontiers.

1

The International Frontier in Historical and Theoretical Perspective

This chapter sets out elements of the intellectual context in which contemporary assumptions about frontiers have developed, with some references to the political processes through which the current international frontier has emerged. Frontier- or boundary-making has been a constantly repeated activity in the course of human history, but the characteristics of frontiers have varied considerably over time. Frontiers between states in post-Reformation Europe more and more resembled one another and became rooted, as institutions, in a common fund of ideas. Ideas of sovereignty, exclusive control over contiguous territory,1 the nation-state and the juridical equality of states in an international society regulated by a voluntary acceptance of international law resulted in the spread of a common understanding of the frontiers of states.

Certain periods have, in retrospect,2 made significant contributions to the ideas on which modern state frontiers are based – the Roman empire for notions of territoriality, the ‘universalist’ doctrines of the Middle Ages which offered an alternative project to the hardened frontiers of the states which emerged in Europe from the fifteenth century onwards, the development of the frontiers of France which prefigured those of the other European ‘nation-states’, the global spread of European notions of the frontier after the colonizing of lands in other continents, and the challenges to the frontier of the sovereign state in the post-Second World War international system. These landmarks in the history of frontiers mark an evolution in terms of stability of frontiers and the complexity of frontier functions.

The Legacy of Rome

Most ancient cultures and civilizations have left little mark on the territorial organization of the contemporary world. Their cosmologies, in which their sense of territory was rooted, are utterly alien to modern secular thought. But the modern international frontier and the related concept of sovereignty owe much to Roman ideas of territoriality, of dominium and imperium, transmitted through the Catholic Church, rediscovered by political theorists of the Renaissance and regarded as useful tools by jurists serving the interests of princes in the early modern period of European history. There are many problems associated with the reception of the Roman private law notion of property (dominium) and public law notion of undivided authority (imperium) in early modern Europe but only the main lines and understandings are relevant here.3

The influential features of Roman law and administration were developed from the first century BC. The relative density of population in Italy, from the period of the Roman Republic (509–27 BC), resulted in settlements being adjacent to one another, without the swamps, forests or uninhabited zones, which characteristically separated many pre-modern societies. As a consequence, clearly demarcated boundaries between settlements in ancient Italy were established (as they were in classical Greece, for the same reasons). When the Romans extended their empire into Gaul, they took this practice of demarcating boundaries with them. Often the old territorial divisions of indigenous peoples were confirmed by stone frontier-markers. The Romans also established a hierarchy of territorial divisions, commencing with the pagus at the base, then the civitatis and, at the apex, the provincia or regio.

The external frontiers of the Roman empire have seemed to the superficial observer, such as Rudyard Kipling,4 to have been the archetype of the linear defensive frontier, dividing civilization from barbarism. The fossatum of North Africa, the limes of Syria, the Rhine and the Danube, the walls of Hadrian and Antonius (effectively occupied for only twenty years)5 in Britain seem to have this purpose, if the archaeological evidence is viewed through the prism of the nineteenth-century experience of boundary-making. Even a sophisticated historian, Edward Luttwak, asserts that the Romans, like the British in India, sought fixed ‘scientific frontiers’ behind which the legions could defend the empire from external attack.6 However, it seems more likely that they were means of policing the territory through which these great fortifications ran; Roman power and authority were felt by peoples far beyond them.7 The relations between Imperial Rome and neighbouring peoples varied greatly during the centuries and between the different frontiers of the empire.8 But Roman territorial organization – the outer limits of the march of the legions, as well as the internal Roman territorial divisions – continued to mark the social and political landscape long after the empire’s disintegration.

The larger divisions of the empire, such as Hispania, Italia and Gallia, eventually became the territorial basis of the modern state system.9 Some external Roman frontiers left an almost indelible impression. As Fernand Braudel writes: ‘The frontier between the Rhine and the Danube was … a cultural frontier par excellence: on the one side Christian Europe, on the other the Christian periphery, conquered at a later date. When the Reformation occurred, it was along virtually the same frontier that the split in Christianity became established: Protestants on one side and Catholics on the other. And it is, of course, visibly the ancient limes or outer limit of the Roman empire. Many examples would tell the same story.’10 However, the great paradox in modern European political development, analysed by Stein Rokkan, is that the stable and strong states were established at the periphery of the territory of the Roman empire and the old core in Italy dissolved into loosely associated, competing and often warring, civitates.11

Within the territory they governed directly, the Romans were practical administrators who sought clear and comprehensive systems of rules – uncontrolled or unassigned territory was anathema to them. They also attempted to establish clear administrative hierarchies, and this included the hierarchical arrangement of territorial units. The final authority, the imperium, was at the apex of the hierarchy and the modern notion of sovereignty was derived from it. This association of final authority, of hierarchy and of territorial organization was taken over by the Catholic Church in the late Roman empire; the hierarchical system of archdioceses, dioceses and parishes with the bishop of Rome as the source of authority was well established by the fourth and fifth centuries.

The Middle Ages and Universalism

The uniformity of church territorial organization was disrupted by the collapse of the Roman Empire; from the sixth to the eleventh centuries there was a process described as the feudalization of the church.12 However, clarity of territorial organization of the church remained an aspiration. As early as the ninth century all Christians were assigned to a specific parish and subsequently rules forbade them to listen to sermons in other parishes. The great councils of the Lateran, Lyon, Clermont and Dalmatia endorsed canons which made the church more bureaucratic and more hierarchical. They revived the Roman principles of territorial organization for the regular clergy. In this, the church was in advance, in principle if not always in practice, of the feudal secular order.13

Map 1 Roman administrative areas in Gaul

Map 2 The Roman empire at its greatest extent, showing main fortified lines

By contrast with the church, land holding and allegiance in lay society were often highly fragmented. The land of the feudal nobility in the late Middle Ages was often not contiguous; a village could depend on more than one lord; lords could owe allegiance to more than one ruler; manorial courts, royal courts and ecclesiastical courts dispensed customary, statutory and church law to the same populations. Powerful rulers attempted to simplify the complexity of territorial organization in order to strengthen their authority. They initiated accurate record-keeping about land-holding, commencing with the Domesday Book in the late eleventh century in England, followed over a century later by a similar exercise in France.14 This record-keeping was the basis of a new conception of territory in western Europe, which gradually spread to central and eastern Europe.

Several developments were associated with the new conception of territory, such as the institutionalization of secular administration and justice, rudimentary forms of representative assembly to approve taxes and legislation and conceptions of the political order based on more durable and impersonal loyalties than feudal relationships. Genealogy and genealogical myth remained as a basis of claims to authority, but they were first supplemented by others and then replaced – more quickly in western than in central and eastern Europe. Also, the myth of the universal empire, partly protecting and partly subordinate to a universal church, was slowly undermined. With hindsight, there is a sense of historical inevitability about the shift to state sovereignty; but absolute control of territory by rulers recognizing no superior authority was for a long time challenged by various forms of universalism. The core belief of universalism was that some high authority ought to hold sway over the whole of mankind or at least the civilized part of it. This belief came to be regarded as archaic or utopian in post-Reformation, post-Renaissance Europe. But it never entirely disappeared and eventually it took secular form.

Universalism was the philosophical and theological basis of the empire of Charlemagne (800–14) and remained that of the Holy Roman Empire, with diminishing plausibility, for a millennium. Even Charlemagne accepted that there were territorial limits to his empire; his authority neither extended to, nor clashed with, a competing universalism, that of Byzantium and the eastern church.15 Systematic boundary-making within the empire commenced on Charlemagne’s death when the patrimony was divided between his three grandsons at the treaty of Verdun in 843.16 A third universalism emerged after the collapse of Byzantium, the tsar of all the Russias in conjunction with the Russian Orthodox Church. This partnership of throne and altar had more limited success and was eventually identified with an ethno-cultural exclusivity – pan-Slavism.17

These empires had an aspiration to suzerainty over the whole of Christendom but they never came near to achieving it and, despite this pretension, they always treated competing Christian rulers differently from non-Christian rulers. The practice of greater consideration, in diplomatic practices, by Christian rulers for each other survived as a polite gesture towards the belief in the unity and universality of Christendom during the growing secularization of politics of the eighteenth century into the age of European imperial domination of other continents in the nineteenth century. There were, of course, non-European, non-Christian empires, which also aspired to universal authority, emerging in the Muslim world and in China,18 recurring during the successive dynasties which ruled the Chinese empire. These have not had the same influence as the Roman empire over the contemporary state system or over the attempts to overcome the defects of that system through international organization.

The Emergence of the Modern State System

In western Europe during the Middle Ages, the uneasy, sometimes conflicting, relationship between Pope and Holy Roman Emperor allowed the development of polities independent of both – the modern European states. The state system was anchored in the doctrine of the exclusive authority of the state within its own territory, subordinated only to the higher authority of God; states did not recognize the hegemony of any terrestrial ruler or universal church except, in the case of Catholic states, that of the Papacy in narrowly conceived spiritual matters. After the Reformation, according to the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, rulers imposed, where they could, the religion of their subjects.

Universalist thinking inspired by Christian doctrine survived in the new political order in various schemes for universal peace, such as those of the abbé Saint-Pierre and Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, and in ultramontane Catholicism which sought to revive the Papacy’s influence over temporal matters by strengthening the Pope’s spiritual authority. Even the late eighteenth-century Anglican conservative Edmund Burke was influenced by universalist thinking when he described Europe as ‘virtually one great State having the same basis of general law’ and that ‘no citizen of Europe could be altogether an exile in any part of it’.19 Universalism took a decidedly secular form during the French Revolution in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 and, more explicitly, in Marxism and in some other forms of nineteenth-century socialist thought. In political practice, those who upheld universalism were of marginal significance, except briefly after the French and the Russian revolutions, faced by the power and willingness of states to repress, and persecute, those who actively sought to put into effect universalist doctrines.

The contemporary international frontier developed as a result of a curious amalgam of universalism and particularist thinking. It is inextricably linked with the emergence of the concept of sovereignty in the theory and practice of European politics from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.20 Sovereignty was not associated with a particular form of government – as Hobbes expressed it, the sovereign could be ‘the one or the many’ – but it was the basis of all properly established states.

The important implication of this doctrine for frontiers was that they were necessarily exclusive. The absolute nature of the authority exercised by the sovereign over territory and over individuals explicitly denied the possibility of the interpenetration of jurisdictions of the medieval polity in which kings, lords and clergy had autonomous judicial authority in the same territory. A single, supreme and independent sovereign was the hallmark of the state system of modern Europe, although competing authorities were common until the French Revolution of 1789. As far as crossing frontiers was concerned, the right of unimpeded exit for those individuals who had broken no law was admitted, but there was no equivalent right of entry. This right was in the gift of the sovereign, who could impose any conditions on foreigners who sought it; an important exception was made through the development of diplomatic immunity to the representatives of other sovereign powers.

The French Example

Establishing the identity of state-nation-territory, the underlying aspiration of the modern state, has been subject to many interpretations. But the linear frontier was the first requirement to establish this identity. This frontier was a rarity in the Middle Ages because of the virtual absence of continuous lines of fortification.21 But in the late medieval and early modern periods, the kingdoms of western Christendom were virtually compelled to centralize in order to survive. Any weakness of central authority was ruthlessly exploited by internal and external enemies. An alternative model of political development, the city-state, which Braudel has called Europe’s first fatherland,22 showed remarkable vitality in northern Italy and in the Hanseatic towns of northern Europe, but it eventually could not resist the concentration of power in the kingdom-states. As Anthony Giddens has written, the nation-state replaced ‘the city as the “power-container” shaping the development of capitalist societies’.23 France was the great example of a kingdom compelled either to concentrate power or to fragment into a myriad local jurisdictions.

The historical problem, posed clearly by Lucien Febvre at the beginning of the twentieth century, concerns the aftermath of the Middle Ages: ‘… how and why these heterogeneous regions which no divine decree designated for unity … finally came together; this unity, first mentioned by Caesar in describing Gaul as having certain “natural limits”, which was an approximate forerunner of France … How and why despite so many “offers” … despite so many failed initiatives to create Anglo-French, Franco-Iberian, Franco-Lombard or Franco-Rhenish nations, once seen as possibilities and sometimes established for limited periods, has Gallia succeeded in re-emerging after so many ordeals.’24 An adequate explanation requires a detailed historical account of the interplay of chance and political choice over many generations but the main historical landmarks are clear. Fernand Braudel is the most recent of a line of distinguished French historians who have asked the question why the French state-nation-territory identity came into being. He concludes that it was the result of a combination of the European and Mediterranean context of France, of technology and economic organization, of imagination and of political action.25

The thoroughgoing expression of national sovereignty and the modern state frontier by the French Revolution had a long history. The great originality of French rulers was that they brought the various defining features of the modern frontier together – individually these features made their first appearance elsewhere. For example, the technical prerequisite of frontier delimitation, the accurate map, made a later appearance in France than in either Italy or England.26 The first map of the French kingdom, attributed to Oronce Fine, was drawn in 1525, about a century after Ptolemy’s Geography which stimulated the first generation of modern Italian cartographers, was rediscovered in Italy.27 Strict demarcation of frontiers had, of course, long preceded modern maps. Frontier-markers were used in antiquity by the Greeks and the Romans28 and some ancient polities in east Asia. In modern Europe, France was not the first in this field. The demarcated linear frontier made a precocious reappearance in fifteenth-century Muscovy;29 frontier-markers were used at roughly the same time to mark the limits of Brabant.30

France was, however, the precursor of the centralized territorial state. The French kingdom grew unambiguously around one centre, the Île de France, in a series of piecemeal territorial acquisitions through conquest and dynastic marriages; the domains of the king of France eventually became (except for a few anomalies) a contiguous entity. France acquired a territorial clarity which contrasted with the fluctuations of imperial rule in Germany with its patchwork of fiefs, principalities, duchies, free towns and bishoprics; the religious division at the Reformation of the German-speaking peoples into Catholics and Protestants, as well as the non-German territorial interests of the Habsburgs, hindered the process of political unification and strengthened the contrast between German-speaking lands and France.

The beginnings of modern notions of a French territory were apparent in the thirteenth century. In 1244, the French king forbade his liegemen to hold land within the Holy Roman Empire and, in particular, banned the swearing of allegiance to both king and emperor (the notion of the king of France as ‘emperor in his own domain’ was developed). Marc Bloch considers that from this time there was what could legitimately be described as a frontier between France and the empire.31 Towards the end of the thirteenth century royal power – military, fiscal, judicial – came to be felt in the marches of the realm. During this period, the customs policy of Philippe le Bel, who, sought to use the frontiers as a fiscal tool, required knowledge of the exact whereabouts of the frontiers.32 The frontier became a focus of royal policy, with great practical as well as symbolic importance. Its symbolic importance was underlined by actions such as the two-year progress (1564–6) by Charles IX and his mother Catherine de Medici along all the frontiers of France.33 But it was not until the middle of the sixteenth century that French monarchs could have a precise image of the extent of their territories because of the lack of accurate maps.34

In the second half of the sixteenth century, the idea of the natural frontiers of France, often wrongly attributed to Cardinal Richelieu, was revived by André Thevet to discredit the medieval divisions of French territory. The geographical image of France used by Thevet was derived from Caesar’s Gallic Wars and from the classical geographer Strabo, who both described Gaul as bounded by the Pyrenees, the Rhine, the Alps and the seas. This idea of these natural frontiers was disseminated in French scholarly and educational literature from the sixteenth century onwards, and by the time of the French Revolution it had become generally accepted. The great orators of the Revolution, Danton and Carnot, referred to natural frontiers,35 like their royal predecessors, to justify the expansion of French territory. Thus Carnot, on 14 February 1794, stated to the Convention: ‘The ancient and natural limits of France are the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees. The parts detached have been usurped … by diplomatic pretensions, based on ancient possession, without any basis either in judgement or in reason.’ According to the revolutionaries, only peoples were sovereign and had the right to decide the allocation of territory. In this spirit, a crude public ‘opinion poll’ was held in 1795 on whether the Rhine should be the frontier of the French Republic and the results were published.36

Map 3 The expansion of French territory

The establishment of the modern French frontier was a process which took between three and five centuries – the demarcated frontier which was a boundary for legal, fiscal, administrative, political and ecclesiastical systems was not achieved until the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. The assertion of uniform state power over the territory of France and the abolition of internal fiscal frontiers was not finally accomplished until the great abolition of privileges during the Revolution on 4 August 1789. This great act swept away the anomalies, particularisms, feudal jurisdictions and internal customs barriers of the ancien régime and created a united country. A radical reorganization of the internal boundaries of the country followed.37

After the Revolution it came to be widely, but erroneously, believed that, until 1789, it had been impossible to identify the exact location of the frontiers of France. Some of the most famous names in French academic geography at the beginning of the twentieth century – de Martonne, Gallois, Vidal de la Blache – propagated this belief in their contributions to a study group during the First World War.38 Subsequent research has shown that they were wrong and that, under the ancien régime, although complicated, the frontiers were carefully and precisely negotiated. However, this notion of the uncertain frontiers of France served the cause of French expansionism by implying that claims opposing those of France had little legitimacy.

French expansion towards the Rhine had much success but was reversed by the defeat of Napoleon in 1814. Many, for example Victor Hugo in Le Rhin, continued to dream of France acquiring the whole of the left bank of the Rhine. The struggle over Alsace and part of Lorraine, which had been going on since the seventeenth century, continued. The conviction that the two predominantly German-speaking areas of Alsace and north-east Lorraine were indisputably French (because their populations wished to be French) became deeply entrenched in France in the nineteenth century. Franco-German rivalry assumed new bitterness when these territories, including some predominantly French-speaking areas, were annexed by the newly united German Reich after the 1870–1 Franco-Prussian War – only to be reacquired by France in 1919. After the two world wars of the twentieth century, French policy was to detach the Saar from Germany by creating an autonomous state, but this policy failed.

The modern frontier, in conventional thinking about the nation-state, separated two distinctive peoples or, to use a more pretentious term, ‘civilizations’. A ‘civilization’ shared by all the inhabitants of French territory was completed only when the quasi-totality of the population became aware of their ‘Frenchness’. This was achieved in the mid- and late nineteenth century when the state system of education, cheap newspaper press and the railways integrated the previously isolated and often non-French-speaking rural populations into the French nation.39 The conviction that any intrusion across or any infringement of the frontier of the territory not expressly sanctioned by the French state should be firmly resisted came to be shared by the great majority of the population. Any attempt to detach territory, whether by separatist movements from within or by claims of another state from without, was regarded as a fundamental attack on the integrity of la patrie, on the one and indivisible French Republic, and on the French nation. There was virtual unanimity that Alsace-Lorraine was an integral part of France (except among a minority of the population concerned), after the annexation by the German Reich in 1871. This contrasts with the unsuccessful attempt to persuade the French population during the Algerian War of 1954–62 that the national territory stretched from Dunkirk to Tamanrasset, covering the whole of Algeria; de Gaulle and the great majority of the French electorate did not believe that the Algerian Muslims were or wished to be French.

The popular image of France as the ‘hexagon’, a term which, Eugen Weber has shown, has only recently become part of French political language,40 now indicates that France has clear boundaries, disputed only by tiny numbers of Basque, Catalan and Breton autonomists. The Rhine frontier, the most problematic of France’s frontiers in recent history, is no longer contested; the Alsatian ‘malaise’, synonym for autonomist sentiment in the inter-war period, has disappeared. The only part of French territory about which doubts remain is Corsica – Corsican cultural and social distinctiveness is recognized by the autonomy statute of 1982, the first time a special status for a segment of the national territory has been recognized by a French Republic. There is no longer controversy over any of the mainland frontiers of France.

Nation, Territory and International Relations

Although France is the exemplar of the development of the state-nation-territory identity and has had a considerable influence on the development of modern ideas about the international frontier, the French historical experience is different from that of other European nation-states. The geographical situation, the economic development, the enemies confronted and the political and administrative systems of the other strong states of the Atlantic seaboard which emerged from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries – Spain, Portugal, England, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian monarchies – were extremely diverse. The concept of natural frontiers either made no sense, as in the Portuguese or the Dutch cases, or was self-evident, as in the English case; it could not play the same role in the statecraft of these countries as it did in France.

The idea of sovereignty tout court gained wide, almost universal, currency but ‘national sovereignty’ or ‘sovereignty of the people’ was either modified or not adopted at all in the constitutional principles of the other states. However, the state-nation-territory bonding exemplified by revolutionary France became the mythomoteur of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalism in Europe and in other continents as the European colonial empires declined in the mid-twentieth century. The nation-state introduced a precise sense of territorial identity and of territorial control. Rulers of these states, after societies reached a certain threshold of economic development, possessed the technical ability to police their territories and the military resources to offer credible resistance to armed intrusions across national boundaries.

The system in which the claim to absolute territorial sovereignty prevailed was as conflict-prone as the feudal system of personal loyalty which it replaced. In the absence of any universal authority, the only way to maintain peace and stability was to achieve a balance between the various independent entities. This resulted in an apparently endless process of territorial adjustments, or compensations as they were termed, to preserve the balance.41 As in later imperial competition in Asia, the ‘balance of power’ resulted in various buffers, protectorates, clients, suzerainties, spheres of influence and neutral zones on the fringes of the great powers. The desire to make the balance more stable, and avoid the ruinous costs of war, resulted in two institutionalized practices which started to undermine the absolute nature of state sovereignty.

The first was the formulation of rules, ‘the law of nations’, to regulate the conduct of war and peace. At first, these did little more than codify existing practice and, in any case, were ignored with impunity by states. Eventually, these rules came to have the character of obligations in international law and constrained what most states did in most circumstances. The second practice was the meeting of heads of state, or their representatives, to legitimate a great settlement – a new balance of power. These took place after great wars – Westphalia in 1648, Utrecht in 1713, Vienna in 1815 and Versailles in 1919 (the first two were meetings of diplomats, the second two of heads of state) – but eventually the idea of a more permanent international assembly began to take shape, leading to the establishment of the League of Nations, then to the United Nations and to regional European organizations after the Second World War.

Under the old pre-1914 system, frontier disputes were of four main, often overlapping, kinds. First, territorial disputes, supported where possible by historic claims, ethno-nationalist arguments or assertions about the equitable distribution of the spoils of war, were a means of gaining advantage or domination over competing powers. Second, there were ‘positional’ disputes over the precise location of the boundary because of different understandings of the principles on which the boundary was drawn. Some boundaries were demarcated only after a considerable lapse of time and this could lead to different interpretations of what had been originally agreed.42 Third, there were struggles over sources of wealth and strategic areas, which led states to seize territories, such as the annexation of Silesia by Frederick the Great. Fourth, the whole system of territorial adjustment was called into question by revolutionary states, notably by the French revolutionary state (followed in the twentieth century by Russia, Germany, China, Libya and Iraq) which set out to change fundamentally the political map.43

Explanations of Frontier Disputes and of the Decline of these Disputes

The great crisis of legitimacy which followed the French Revolution of 1789 necessitated new bases for political authority. This stimulated secular explanations of territorial and frontier disputes. Sometimes explanations of territorial conflict were ideological justifications of expansionism. Geopolitical scenarios, such as Sir Harold Mackinder’s heartland and rimland to explain the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial struggle in the Eurasian land mass were clearly, in retrospect, a justification of the pursuit of British imperial interests.44