The Territorial Dimension Of Politics

Within, Among, And Across Nations

Ivo D. Duchacek, Helena Duchacek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000306255
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This comparative study examines the dialectical tensions between global and regional interdependence and the fragmentation of humankind into territorial entities. Political authority may remain territory-bound, but borders increasingly are penetrated by pollutants, individuals, noncentral governments in search of foreign trade and investment, and transnational corporations, as well as the traditional exchanges of trade, media, and culture. The result of these transborder flows, accelerated by new technologies, is a new variety of international relations among "perforated sovereignties.†Dr. Duchacek analyzes the territorial organization of political authority in both democratic and authoritarian frameworks as well as in unitary and federal systems. Case studies focus on new forms of transborder interactions between neighboring countries, especially in North America and in Western Europe. The book is of major interest to scholars in the fields of political science and political economy. Quotations from a variety of political theorists and practitioners, illustrative diagrams, and maps make the book suitable for students of comparative politics, international relations, comparative federalism, and public policy.

Part 1
Territorial Politics

1
Components of International and National Systems

Territory: the land around a town, a domain … Etymology unsettled: usually taken as a derivative of terra earth, land … but the original form territorium V. terratorium suggests derivation from terrere to frighten … a place from which people are warned off.

—The Oxford English Dictionary

The union of several village-communities forms, when complete, an actual state [polis], attaining, so to speak, the limit of perfect selfsufficience: at the outset a union for a bare livelihood, it exists to promote good [higher] life.

—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)

Phenomena observed either as political or geographical appear to have four permanent characteristics in common: (1) they develop in the same space, that is, in the space available to human activities; (2) they reckon the diversity of that space; (3) they develop according to decisions influenced by the perception of spatial circumstances; (4) they reckon with a considerable diversity of the ways in which these circumstances and what should be done about them are perceived by people.

—Jean Gottmann (“Confronting Centre and Periphery” 1980)

Ideally, humankind is one and indivisible. In fact, the human race has lived for millennia in separate territorial compartments—local, tribal, or national— and organized its work, set common goals, and progressed toward them within geographically delineated areas, large or small. The political organization of the world is still primarily based on territorial divisions and subdivisions of the land surface and its imaginary extensions into the seas and air space. The territorial segments both reflect and shape geographically delineated territorial interests. The central concept of this study is a territorial community, a territorial interest group, by which I mean an aggregate of individuals and groups who are aware of their bonds of identification with each other as well as with the past, the present, and hopes for the future of their area.

The territorial segments of the earth’s surface are fenced off from one another by either natural borders, such as rivers and mountain ranges or artificial boundaries established by political will or whim. “We fashion sensibilities, extract our sense of wants and needs, and locate our aspirations with respect to a geographical environment that is in large part created,”¹ David Harvey rightly noted in another context. The territorial compartments compete with but rarely fail to tame such nonterritorial challenges as economic interdependence, universalist creeds and ideologies, and cross-border movements of persons, products, and pollutants. Today, territorial communities, not humankind as a collective whole, try to handle and manage the contemporary complex interdependence, including modern technology that makes global destruction and global construction possible. In Reinhold Niebuhr’s words uttered forty years ago, “Technical civilization has created an economic interdependence which generates insufferable frictions if it is not politically managed.”²

For the past 350 years, the most durable and relatively efficient unit to ensure internal order and welfare has been the territorial state. Since individuals and groups usually give their effective allegiance to such a state and emotionally identify with it (the usual terms for such collective allegiance and emotional identification with a territory and its inhabitants are “nationalism” and “patriotism”), the unit is generally labeled the nation-state, clearly, an emotion-laden term. In the case of many federal and multinational states, however, especially in languages other than English, the term “nation” is quite misleading. Many territorial nation-states are composed of ethno-territorial communities that may be perceived by their inhabitants and other people as “stateless nations.” This situation exists in the cases of the Soviet Union, Israel, Yugoslavia, India, Czechoslovakia, Malaysia, and Canada.

Today, the human race is divided into over 160 nation-states. The lawgiving and law-enforcing limits of the various governments, central and noncentral, as indicated by national boundaries, are considered in principle as impenetrable. The territorial nation-state is still the largest political community people identify with, both pragmatically and emotionally; it is endowed with adequate authority to establish and enforce laws within clearly defined geographic boundaries in order to ensure domestic tranquillity, general welfare, preservation of territorial culture and/or language, and security (often illusory) against external threats. Today, people also expect their state to handle the contemporary challenges of economic, technological, and ecological interdependence. Despite some groups’ claims to the contrary, a territorial state is still considered a more efficient instrument than any other alternative (such as world government) for coping with humankind’s collective problems.

The spatial two-dimensionality of the territory is of cardinal importance. Speaking of the nation-state, Kenneth E. Boulding noted that the dimension of simple geographic space is perhaps “the most striking characteristic of the national state as an organization, by contrast with organizations such as firms or churches, that it thinks of itself as occupying, in a ‘dense’ and exclusive fashion, a certain area of the globe.”³

On the Importance of Being Fenced In

If we view a territorial community as being primarily a geographically delineated social communication system, its decisive boundaries are identified by a relative discontinuity in the frequence of communication.⁴ People do not communicate as often across a border as they do within a territorial community. Some of the reasons for the frequency or intensity of communication are language, habit, and the fact that the boundaries of communicative efficiency and administrative authority usually coincide, although, as we shall see in Chapters 9 and 10, in some border situations people often tend to communicate across international borders more intensively than with their own but too distant national centers (along the U.S.-Mexican border, for example). The coercive apparatus that sets limits to communications takes the form of frontier guards, customs officers, passport requirements, censorship, or the jamming of foreign radio broadcasts and television programs. Yet a territorial state may still in John H. Herz’s words,

salvage one feature of humanity which seems ever more threatened by the ongoing rush of mankind into the technological conformity of a synthetic planetary environment: diversity of life and culture, of traditions and civilizations. If the nation can preserve these values, it would at long last have emerged as that which the philosophers of early nationalism had expected it to be: the custodian of cultural diversity, among groups mutually granting each other their peculiar worth.⁵

Anthony D. Smiths words concerning nationalism in general also apply to its twin brother, the territorial nation-state:

The very attempt to eradicate nationalism actually helps to entrench it further … and it would appear more sensible and appropriate to try to live with it, taming its excesses through mutual recognition and legitimizations, in so far as these seem practicable in given stress.⁶

Singly, the approximately 160 nation-states own and administer their portions of the world; collectively, they influence the whole of it. No inhabited territory has escaped direct or indirect control by territorial states. The colonies, protectorates, and dependencies that existed or still remain in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific represent administrative extensions of territorial states, mostly West European. Although the high seas and outer space do not belong to any territorial state, the question of where the nonterritorial limits of those seas and outer space begin is a matter of either specific agreements or controversy among the territorial masters of the earth. Within nation-states, internal boundaries determine the extent of administration and political control that are exercised by noncentral units of authority: towns, cities, counties, cantons (in the Swiss terminology), Länder (in German), chous (in Chinese), regions, provinces, or, in the federal terminology of North and South America and India states—a term that tends to introduce some terminological confusion in many comparative analyses dealing with nations, “States,” and their sub-divisions, “states.”

The number of territorial corrals into which humankind has split varies with time and according to the various criteria we may choose to use. The United States can be counted as one territorial unit if our criterion is that of a constitutional monopoly to determine the nation’s collective defense, taxes and diplomacy. In terms of territorial authority with respect to internal affairs and some external affairs, the United States may be, for some purposes, counted as an aggregate of over fifty units (fifty states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and several dependencies) or as an aggregate of over 38,000 units of local government—nearly 90,000 if we add the well over 50,000 school and special districts. According to one criterion, Canada is a ten-province territorial state (to which the Northwest and Yukon Territories have to be added); according to another, it is a binational state composed of the two founding peoples, the anglophone and the francophone communities. The political organization of the whole world remains primarily based on territorial divisions and subdivisions, which reflect as well as shape territorial interests. “We have our created spaces,” noted E. Gordon Ericksen, “as reflections of life styles, sentiments, values held dear.⁷” Political parties, even when committed to nonterritorial creeds, are usually organized to reflect or manipulate the interests of territorial electoral districts. Functional interest groups, from labor to chambers of commerce, although formed to promote or defend nonterritorial specific interests, cannot escape the gravitational pull of territoriality: the interest groups are bound to be organized into local cells or chapters. Dividing and subdividing the world according to the territorial principle seems inescapable. The process may have begun with the first delineation of boundaries between two clusters of inhabited caves and their respective hunting reservations. As political animals, humans seem to be inevitably also territorial ones.

How and why do people identify, rationally or emotionally or both, with a given territory and its values and goals? Several explanations will be suggested. Although they will be discussed separately, it should be kept in mind that they are intimately interconnected, each conditioning, causing, or reinforcing the other.

Duty and Habit to Obey

Humans often identify with a territory and with each other because they must. A territorial authority that asks for and enforces obedience within its boundaries is sometimes based on both past and present consensus, at other times, it is based on the results of a successful coup d’etat or conquest. In either case, “the existence of a political boundary is itself a major contribution to a sense of solidarity…. Among the most important experiences that can unite a group is that they share the same unit of government.⁸” This unity clearly exists when the authority represents a territorial consensus. The point is that a certain degree of solidarity—a solidarity based on collaboration due to fear—may also result when the unit of government has been artificially or forcibly imposed, is intensely disliked, but within its boundaries must be obeyed.

Usually only an activist minority chooses to oppose an illegitimate government or to emigrate. In the latter case, the people who choose exile place themselves under a different territorial authority whose goals and methods they deem preferable. In order to physically survive, the majority may not see any rational choice other than to address its demands for order, services, and means of survival to the administrative authority—thus cooperating with it—which, however artificial, illegitimate, and therefore resented it may be, is in charge of territorial tranquillity and welfare.

Survival and Submission

Such a dilemma between resistance against insuperable odds (and possible death) and partial collaboration with the illegitimate territorial authority (and life) was met by the majority of the French after the defeat of their armed forces by Nazi Germany in June 1940. (A similar dilemma confronted the Hungarians in 1956 and the Czechoslovaks in 1968 following the Soviet invasion and occupation of their respective national territories.) The French national territory was divided into two zones to suit the defense and security requirements of the occupying Nazi forces. Northern France was administered by the German military government which was also in charge of Paris and the French Atlantic coast. Southern France and central France were administered by a French puppet government in Vichy presided over by Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain. Some French went into exile and formed the Free French movement under General Charles de Gaulle; others formed an underground resistance movement that operated behind the German lines and disregarded the Nazi-imposed territorial boundaries. A few actively collaborated with the territorial authorities and their concept of a divided France.

The majority of the French considered the imposed and entirely artificial division of their country a temporary arrangement pending the victory of the Allied or the Axis Forces. But having chosen to live as best or as honorably as they could under the circumstances, they had to obey the territorial authorities and even respect the new territorial bou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Territorial Politics
• Part 2: Federal Systems
• Part 3: Confederal Associations
• Part 4: Permeable Sovereignties
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index