Your Land is My Land : Irredentism

 

In my post 'Lie of the Land', I explored what it means to own land as an individual and how this has evolved. Now, I want to question the basis of the 'irredentist' claims made by some nations to lands beyond their current borders. While individual issues lead to trouble and strife, national disputes often end up in horrific bloodshed, usually spilt by civilians and conscripts sent off to fight these wars and seldom by those who started them.

The nature of the problem has changed over time. Until comparatively recently, empires, kingdoms and other fiefdoms exercised strong control over their heartlands but less over borderlands, especially where these were not defined by natural features such as rivers or mountains. In Britain, the Welsh Marches were the borderlands where de facto control was delegated by the King to the local warlords on the frontline of a constant struggle to increase or defend territory.

Marcher Lords 

Very often, the motive underlying an irredentist claim is greed or a serious issue of national self-esteem or racism, frequently arising from the leadership. Sometimes countries are faced with real threats. Their 'it’s us or them' response is understandable. You can judge for yourself, but to my mind, this can also simply be an excuse for some recreational national expansion. There is little that can be said in support of straightforward empire-building or the various colonial genocides carried out by so-called civilised powers. I am not interested in those here but rather the many more recent claims dressed up with explicit justifications based on ethnicity, history or geographic rationality. The dictionary labels these ‘irredentist’. I want to explore the validity of each in turn.

ETHNICITY
Both before and for a long time afterwards, locals nearly everywhere paid scant attention to which side of a notional border they were on unless it affected them directly. Their main allegiance was to their ethnic group rather than whichever nation claimed them as citizens at the time. There was no barrier on the road or bleak shed at the port, nobody cared where the wood was gathered or the cows grazed, passports didn’t exist and a lot of people, herders and traders, were effectively nomads.

Over time sovereignties rigidified and began to pay more attention to organising defence and taxation to defend and tax. Europeans had grown used to drawing lines on a map. Many of them had participated in the Berlin Conference of 1884, which effectively diced and sliced Africa for colonial expansion without any Africans being present.

The Berlin Conference 

World War One turbocharged the pace of change and, in particular, the decay of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires led to a redefinition of many of the national borders. Take a look at this list! Link : European Border Changes
Perhaps the most famous legacy is the division of what had been Ottoman territory in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. The BBC called it ‘the map that caused a century of trouble’. Here they are, Colonel Sir Tatton Benvenuto Mark Sykes, 6th Baronet and François Marie Georges-Picot.

All of these early tensions remain in many parts of the world. The colonial powers are often credited and blamed for setting precise borders where previously there had been ambiguity, which was sometimes helpful and took account of political, ethnic and physical realities, and sometimes not.

I took the photo below thirty years ago on the border between Algeria and Niger, near Djanet. The marker posts were placed by a French company in 1960 and spaced many miles apart, but until then, there had been no defined border at all, and the notion was irrelevant to the GPS-free lives of the nomadic people who herd camels there. Now, Algeria's borders are increasingly sealed with fences and walls. 

Algeria / Niger Border 

Ethnicity is still an issue in more developed countries. Putin referred to shared ethnicity and the desirability of creating a single Russian polity as one justification for the annexation of Eastern Ukraine. Russia has also supported a wider, collective Slavic identity, hence in part their support for Serbia. Xi makes a similar case in relation to Taiwan. Don’t smirk! Remember that one of the reasons given for retaining the Falklands and Gibraltar in the face of geographic logic was that they were inhabited by Britons.

Stanley, Falklands, est. 1843. 

Let’s take the salient issue of Russia / Ukraine first. The reality points to a shovelful of hypocrisy here when you consider the myriad of ethnic groups and languages in the east of the Russian Empire assembled by conquest. Wikipedia tells me that, based on their census data, Russia has over 190 ethnic groups. Many are too small to be relevant, but six are over a million. Odds are that a fair number of them don’t speak Russian at home.
Nevertheless, it points to a different argument that is perhaps coherent in theory if not in practice, i.e. not ‘this is our land’ but ‘these are our people’. It departs from a simple conflation of ‘the land’ and ‘the people’. 

Ethnic issues also bubble up in Europe, some of which manifest themselves in language issues. Many will remember the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia and the peaceful division of Czechoslovakia. The Irish wanted a divorce from Britain; now many Scots do. Both Spain and Belgium are divided by language.

Separatists in Flanders.  "Today we are all Catalans"

 

Further back, ethnic issues exacerbated the chaotic reconfiguration of European nations after World War Two. Irredentist claims abound, although many are dormant. To this day, Hungary has claims on neighbouring countries based on areas settled by native Hungarians and many places harbour discontent about the nation they were shovelled into when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismembered after World War One. 

Trieste, below, a city of some 200,000 people, was a fragment of Austro-Hungary absorbed by Italy after a post-war interregnum under British and American control. It seems that not everyone there is entirely happy about that, and indeed, famously, many Italians are apparently unaware that the city is actually part of their country. 

Trieste 2024

HISTORY

J D Vance, echoing other right-wing Republicans, has defined the USA as being a society based on a shared heritage rather than ethnicity or abstract principles such as equality, a narrative far removed from the ideals in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address or even the vision of their Founding Fathers. 

Lincoln At Gettysburg

The problem with claims justified by heritage and history is that they are prone to romantic narratives and the conclusions that can reasonably be drawn from them are disputed, not least the issue of when the back-story ceases to be relevant. Does the Roman Empire give Italy any rights to the lands that it once encompassed? No one (sane) argues that. Some might also argue that Italy is not a linear successor to Rome.

A more recent question might be asked about Russia and the USSR, and the situation there is complicated by the nationhood of Ukraine and the Baltic states flickering in and out of history like a dodgy light bulb. Does Germany have a right to land in what used to be Prussia and reallocated to Poland under duress? Poland itself is one of the several Eastern European countries whose borders have meandered widely over the centuries. Wikipedia describes it here: Link:  The Evolution of Poland

Elsewhere (in the light of current realities, even more ridiculously), does Britain have a right to those parts of the USA it lost in the War of Independence? Or its vast holdings centred on Aquitaine, which it mostly obtained legitimately (through marriages) and lost under duress to the French in 1475?  Or, for that matter, does Mexico have rights to the large chunk of its territory seized under duress by the USA in the mid-1800s? In which political and legal universe might claims of this sort be enforceable?

England's French Empire in 12th c. 

The point is a simple one: how far back can you reasonably go in looking for precedents, and what attention should be paid to the circumstances under which lands were lost? If you start a war and lose it, does this invalidate claims for restitution? Bolivia and Ethiopia have both lost territory in wars, and in doing so, crucially, both lost access to the sea. Both claim a right to a remedy for that, and in both cases, International Law (see later) provides no clear guidance. But it is clear(ish) that claims based on history have a sell-by date, so the former gripes and the latter opts for inept bullying.

Geography
The de facto control of some places defies geographic logic. The British are partly to blame, being keen players of the game of colonial acquisition by ‘sticking a flag in it’.

Branson, a patriotic resident of the 
British Virgin Islands. 

Eddie Izard describes the approach beautifully. See Stick A Flag In It

It is clearly history rather than geography that explains why Britain holds Gibraltar, the Falklands or Diego Garcia. Or, for that matter, that Russia controls Kaliningrad, Spain hangs onto Ceuta and Melilla, and other old colonial powers control microscopic blobs of rock across the globe.

Countries have some rights to the adjacent continental shelf, mainly around exploitation, and Argentina correctly asserts that the Falklands sit on theirs. Similarly, the Channel Islands sit on France’s. Famously, for a long time, Britain claimed a swathe of the Atlantic seabed west of Scotland, based on an uninhabitable rock called Rockall, some 200 miles west of the Hebrides.

Rockall

There are numerous examples around the world. Here is an expandable map of the underwater extrusions. You will see the problem.

Continental Extrusions underwater

Two of the contested British dominions are the Falklands and Gibraltar, where current ethnicity is not a salient factor. Rather, the claims of Argentina and Spain, respectively, are based on geographical propinquity and a dubious curation of the historical record. There are so many ways you can spin these arguments. For instance, what constitutes a first settlement? Or deal with treaties that might have been signed under duress? You can even ask if the nation that wants the land now is the same as the nation that originally lost it. 

Spain has two enclaves in Morocco, and I have heard this justified on the basis that Morocco didn’t exist as a nation when they were established. The Moroccans certainly don't agree, and Spain certainly didn't exist when Gibraltar was first settled. There is a ‘Ship of Theseus' issue here. If, over the years, all of its timbers have necessarily been replaced, is it still the same ship? Is Britain the same country before and after the various Acts of Union? Are the USSR and Russia the same beast? Do Canada and Australia have rights that predate their independence?

Each case seems unique. However, if there has to be a border, there has to be some sensible limit on how it can be defined. Life would be chaotic if there were too many exclaves and enclaves. Baarle-Hertog in Belgium / Netherlands is the classic example of a place where your front door can be in one country and your back door in another, and in their case, the national border is extremely fragmented. In the pic below, the yellow areas are Belgian and the rest is the Netherlands. There are many others, often hilarious, which play havoc with roaming mobile phone connections.

Baarle Hertog 

My objection to many of these land claims is simple. Has anyone really asked for the views of those directly affected? Are their views to be discounted or sacrificed on the altar of national self-aggrandisement? I am fairly confident that if the people on Gibraltar and the Falklands were (again) asked which nationality they preferred, they would opt for the status quo, and that if they didn't, few in the UK beyond the loony right-wing flag-wavers would care. After all, most were relaxed about Scotland's aspiration for independence and the reunification of Ireland. If they were asked, I would expect the inhabitants of most of Ukraine and Taiwan to opt likewise.  

I am not forgetting that, while Britain is bordered by sea, the UK is not. The split between Northern and Southern Ireland had some logic at the time, but circumstances have changed. So should the border? Here, at least, there is some prospect of those affected getting a say. 

The land border in Ireland

Again, the argument is made that the locals don't count because they were effectively planted there by the occupying state. That case was certainly made by Argentina about the Falklands and more tendentiously by Ukraine about Crimea. But in some cases, the current inhabitants have occupied the place for centuries. When do squatters' rights kick in?

Who Has The Right?

I have already made the point that few borders were defined or stationary in the past but in our fixation with our own experience of European wars and their aftermath, in our Island surrounded by sea, we now take it for granted that most borders are set, if not in stone, on the ground and in convention international law and are comparatively oblivious to the chaos and suffering across the world as nations and even empires rose and fell.

In this context, it would be helpful if it were clear when territorial claims were justifiable. I don't imagine for a moment that it would put an end to the problems, but it might be a better focus for international opprobrium. In this context, all three of the explicit justifications considered here and based on ethnicity, history and geography, seem to me to be either flimsy, flawed or absurd. Cases are supported by cherry-picked evidence, and hypocrisy abounds. The pic below shows military personnel landing on Sandy Cay Reef in the South China Sea, claimed by China but which lies outside their territorial waters and is, in any event, frequently submerged. 

Sandy Cay Reef : 

All this does not take place in a legal vacuum. International Law comprises a mishmash of treaties, custom and general rules-of-thumb, usually based on Western principles, adjudicated by various courts, tribunals and so forth. My rather shallow understanding is that it is quite sensible on matters of sovereignty and, mindful of the constraints and vagaries, places a lot of emphasis on the need for negotiation and arbitration and prizes the principle of self-determination. But this means that they are characterised by compromise rather than clarity and tend to take existing and defined borders as a starting point.

Treaties are probably the most crucial part of all this. The United Nations 'Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties'  in 1969 stated that the principles of free consent and of good faith, and that treaties should be kept, are universally recognised and affirmed that disputes concerning treaties, like other international disputes, should be settled by peaceful means and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law. But in practice, as Hamlet put it, they are ‘as honoured in the breach as the observance’. 

  

The failing of International Law is that, lacking any coherent means of enforcing judgment, its usefulness depends on the cooperation of the States involved and political will, both of which are often lacking. It is no surprise that the countries that were not involved in making these rules sometimes ignore them. 

I have no data, but the impression I get from polls and histories is that populations are generally averse to wars, especially if they are expensive and risky; the exception might be when the perceived wrong is recent and revenge becomes the motive. Maybe they learn from experience. The ‘up and at ‘em’ spirit that was sometimes in evidence before World War One, was followed by a resigned ‘not again’ reaction to the start of World War Two.

But the main impetus comes from the ruler's ego or quest for short-term political advantage. Very often, the implicit reasons are simply bullying nationalism. If there were a psychology of nations, maybe it would identify a lack of self-esteem, particularly affecting leaders with a taste for sabre-rattling. Should we blame their parents for that? Can you be a great leader of a small and weak country?

Charlie Chaplin as 'The Great Dictator'.

Does it matter? In the first of this series of blog posts, I looked at some delusional ideas about what it means for an individual to ‘own’ land. Usually, these result in no physical harm to the population at large. But when it comes to nations, it is different. Their dubious and self-interested arguments, often no better supported than a playground spat, are used to justify frequent and terrible conflicts in which the victims are mostly innocent and often disinterested civilians rather than the perpetrators. For instance, Russia did not start World War Two, in which it is estimated that well over 14,000,000 of its civilians were either killed or starved to death.

So there you have it. Die-hard blood and soil types will doubtless claim that their rights are indeed etched into the fabric of the universe, and no doubt I have done some over-simplification here. But over the course of several posts, I hope I demonstrated the ultimate frailty of claims to land, from the land you occupy to the land you live in. This undermines efforts to use land for the good of all rather than just as a tradable capital asset. At the national level, the consequences are much more serious, and the combination of a weaker legal framework and irredentist claims by monomaniacal rulers based on unsupportable arguments is simply and consistently murderous. For many, there is no escaping that.