The Political Economy of Divided Islands

Unified Geographies, Multiple Polities

G. Baldacchino

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137023131
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Trade & Tariffs
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The authors investigate the exceptional political economy of the ten inhabited islands whose territory is divided amongst two or more countries: that are unitary geographical spaces but fragmented polities.

1

Only Ten: Islands as Uncomfortable Fragmented Polities

Godfrey Baldacchino

The setting

The existence of multiple jurisdictions on distinct continental spaces raises no eyebrows. There are 54 countries in Africa, 50 countries in Europe, 44 in Asia, 23 in North and Central America and 12 in South America. Nor do we habitually consider Africa, North America or South America (let alone Eurasia) as islands, even though – since the carving of the Suez and Panama canals – they would each qualify as pieces of land surrounded by water. Perhaps that is because a continent is often deemed too large to be considered an island. But there is another truism to be considered: that an island deserves a unitary polity. Islands are such special places that they should only be run by, and as, a single administration. How else could one explain Australia, not exactly a small territory, being called an island continent? If Australia is successfully conceptualised as an island – apart from being a continent – this may result not so much by virtue of its size – which is considerable, since it is almost as large as Europe – but by virtue of the fact that it has been, since January 1901, a single country (McMahon 2010).

It is true that there are various practical and logical conveniences in having an island administered as a single political unit. Discrete pieces of land separated by stretches of water from mainlands are difficult to administer from afar, by ‘remote control’, without a modicum of local administration. There is therefore a logistical tendency and preference for an island to be self-administered, especially if distant from its metropolitan power (Peckham 2003: 503). But, there also seems to be some difficulty – conceptual, political, emotional, imaginary and symbolic – with accommodating more than one sovereign state on the same island space.

Even the hugely popular cartoon fictional character Popeye the Sailor Man finds himself embroiled on a divided island. In ‘Chapter III: The Great Rough-House War’, Popeye is unwittingly recruited on behalf of King Blozo and the Nazilian Army to lead the fight against ‘the cowardly Tonsylanians’ led by King Gargileo (Segar 1931/2007: 32). The ‘great war’ is unfolding on the Addynoid Islands, and the map shows a bare, oval-shaped Pacific island neatly divided by a straight line between the two warring kingdoms (ibid.). The subject matter is clearly humorous – all the names are contrived from the human nose and mouth region – but there is apparently, even in the world of cartoon strips, no better or more poignant way to dramatise a division than by having two warring factions living cheek by jowl on the same, small piece of land in the middle of a vast ocean. The dispute is suggested to be a petty affair, and its unfolding on the same small and remote island adds to its overall insignificance. Jonathan Swift might have done even better to emulate this example and locate Lemuel Gulliver’s adventures in Lilliput and Blefuscu on the same island, rather than have two distinct warring island kingdoms, separated by an 800-yard channel (Swift 1726: part I).

There are many islands and archipelagos in the material world, and in some cases they are subject to the competing claims of various regional powers. Consider Mayotte in the Indian Ocean (contested between France and the Comoros); Hans Island/Tartupaluk in the Nares Strait (claimed by both Canada and Greenland/Denmark); Iturup and Kunashir Islands, in the Kurile Group (occupied by Russia but claimed by Japan); and Dokdo/Takeshima (claimed by both Japan and South Korea); and the 250-or-so islands in the South China Sea, including the Spratly Islands, for which claims have been submitted by no less than six countries. However, what is striking here is that, in all these and other cases, the submitted claims for sovereignty are usually to whole islands, not to parts thereof. ‘In fact, only very rarely are islands divided between nation states’ (Royle 2001: 150). There are today only ten inhabited islands whose territory is divided amongst two or more countries. (Or 11, if one adds Sebatik Island, alongside Borneo.)

Islands as absolute spaces

But an island is a naturally closed entity. Its shoreline is the boundary of the bubble separating it from the rest of the world. And then impose a human-made barrier on an island? What is the meaning of isolation – a word derived, in fact, from the Latin for ‘island’ – if you have to share it with someone else?

(Jacobs 2012)

Islands, like the maps that frame them, present themselves as absolute spaces. They are easily imaginable wholes; they are not arbitrary (Jepson 2006: 158). Being geographically defined, and often imagined as circular, an island is easier to hold, to own, to manage or to manipulate, to embrace and to caress. Is this part of the reason why so many islands are self-contained jurisdictions? Just as much as anyone finding oneself on, or close to, an island finds early on a craving to circumnavigate, circumambulate or climb its highest point and ‘take it all in’ (e.g. Baum 1993: 21, Redfield 2000). A drawn island thus tends to fit quite nicely onto a sheet of paper. Is it their boundedness and separation that make islands so attractive to fantasy and mythology? Their beguilingly simple form – often perceived to approximate a circle, that perfect shape – makes the exercise easier, as well as somehow more perfect (Baldacchino 2005a). Utopia, Thomas More’s perfect commonwealth, had to be located on a befittingly ‘just right’ island space: it was enisled, cut away from its original peninsula (More 1516).

The reference to Utopia, and its deliberate islanding, reminds us that islands are also sites for thinking about how to govern; about changing understandings of territory, security and sovereignty (Baldacchino 2010). Islands represent quintessential platforms for nation states: they are delineated spaces and discrete bounded territories that are at once knowable and, because of their consolidated, readily defensible form, also function as ideal embodiments of the state’s relationship to the nation (Peckham 2003: 503). Such a finite and self-evident island geography smoothens the nurturing of a sense of identity that is contiguous with territory (Anckar 2005, Baldacchino 2005b, Srebrnik 2004). Perhaps this condition is one strong explanation for the existence of such few islands in the world today that are divided between more than one country. The political map of the world ushered in after the Treaties of Westphalia (1648) abhors divided islands: countries, and nations, on continents may be carved up by politicians in various ways, and often driven by expediency or compromise; but countries on islands are fashioned by God and/or Nature, and are not – or should not – as easily to be tampered with. To reach such a conclusion is to fall into the ‘territorial trap’: uncritically accepting the notion of territory as embedded in modernist ideas about the state as a fixed unit of sovereign, material space (Agnew 1994).

The elimination of divided islands in recent centuries has indeed proceeded hand in hand with the march of the richly imagined nation state as the default jurisdiction of choice. Prior to the age of the nation state, islands have often been divided: islands such as Sicily (now part of Italy) and Euboea (now part of Greece) were long divided amongst several city states; Tasmania (now part of Australia) was divided between various indigenous tribes prior to European colonisation; mainland Australia itself was effectively run as a series of separate colonies before 1901. Islands such as Corsica (now part of France), Efate (Vanuatu), Elba (Italy), Long Island (New York, USA), Newfoundland (Canada), Sakhalin (Russia), Sardinia (Italy), St Kitts (St Kitts-Nevis), Ternate (Indonesia) and Tobago (Trinidad and Tobago) may now each be territories of single countries, but they have all spent periods of their history as divided places. Until as late as 2008, Sri Lanka was a de facto divided jurisdiction, with the separatist Tamil Eelam coexisting with the official state. Mindanao, in the Philippines, remains in a similar predicament, with a well-entrenched separatist Muslim movement – the Moro Islamic Liberation Front – in control of a significant part of the island. Perhaps the best-known example of a long-divided island that became a single sovereign state in 1707 via ‘Acts of Union’ is Britain: a union, however, whose days may be numbered if Scotland votes ‘yes’ in an independence referendum due in 2014.

That the status of divided islands is problematic or uncomfortable is also evidenced by the tensions that have historically existed between many of those states that find themselves sharing the same island space. Most of the divided islands showcased in this collection spent some time as a single political entity, even if (as in the case of Borneo and Timor) for a few years as Japanese-occupied territories during the Second World War. In other cases – Bolshoi Ussuriiski/Heixiazi, Cyprus, Hispaniola/Quesqueya, Ireland, Tierra del Fuego, Usedom/Uznam and again Timor – one or more of the concerned powers, or constituent organisations thereof, would have coveted (or even controlled, for some time) the whole island, and would typically have tried to either prevent or undo its division, arguing that unification offered a ‘better’ and a more ‘natural’ status. And, in most cases, nationalism and politics apart, there are today serious attempts at crafting transnational economic zones of cooperation from which both sides seek to benefit, even if just to reduce dangerously high border tensions. Indeed, divided islands often have a sui generis trans-border political economy, which is what much of this book is about.

Islands and idiosyncratic governance practices

Recent history continues to throw up examples of political exceptionalism, and islands are very well represented.

The uninhabited island continent of Antarctica is one such place: geography and serendipity have delivered it to the modern world in a shape that has somehow reconciled the traditional states-based rivalry over rights and duties on an entire continent, where a few claimed territorial prerogatives, others denied these in principle or detail, and most of the globe was denied standing at all. Its 20th-century model of governance – the Antarctic Treaty System – remains idiosyncratic; what is more worrying is that it is becoming fragile as states become even more aggressive in extending their territorial rights in search of lucrative mineral deposits (Hemmings et al. 2012).

From the 17th through the late 19th centuries, Svalbard (also known as Spitzbergen), in the Arctic Circle, hosted only seasonal habitation by European and Russian whalers. In 1906, the American-owned Arctic Coal Company founded the first permanent settlement, the town of Longyearbyen, which was soon sold to Norway’s Store Norske coal company. This permanent Norwegian presence was, perhaps, a fateful circumstance: the Spitsbergen Treaty, signed following the First World War, granted Norway sovereignty over the islands; nevertheless, the treaty’s other signatory states could undertake economic (mainly mining) activities on the islands, and the territory was partially demilitarised. Thus, for most of the 20th century, human settlement in the Svalbard archipelago primarily took the form of coal mining company towns operated by Norway and USSR/Russia. Today, Longyearbyen is a multinational town, featuring a fledgling local democracy that at times clashes with the archipelago-wide jurisdiction exercised by the Norwegian-appointed governor (Grydehøj et al. 2012).

Until 1975 part of the four-island French Overseas Territory of the Comoros, Mayotte voted to remain French, thanks largely to manoeuvres by the Paris government, while the other three islands declared independence unilaterally, but on behalf of all four (Newitt 1984). The UN accepted the new state as consisting of all four islands. Since then the dispute has dragged on. The Comoros has meanwhile been battling internal secessionist tendencies and opted for a federal structure to try and assuage these. In 2011, Mayotte became a French overseas regiondepartment (and the only one with a significantly Muslim population); it will probably become an EU Overseas Region in 2014. France justifies and seeks to build legitimacy for its continued ‘occupation’ of Mayotte by writing a historical narrative which detaches Mayotte from the other islands (Muller 2012).

Tuvalu (formerly Ellice Islands) had the unique experience of separating from the Gilbert and Ellice Islands by agreement before independence. As the British colonial administrators introduced representative institutions from the 1970s, tensions developed between Micronesian Gilbertese, resenting disproportionate Ellice success in the civil service, and the Polynesian Ellice Islanders sensing their permanent minority status in the legislature. After a thorough report in 1973 and a referendum in 1974, British officials still doubted whether a separate country of 9,000 would be viable, but they feared unilateral secession. Separation followed in October 1975 and the former eight inhabited islands of the Ellice Group achieved independence as the state of Tuvalu – which means ‘eight standing together’ – in October 1978 (McIntyre 2012). The lingering secessionist tendencies of even small archipelago states and territories – think of Anguilla, Aruba, Nevis and the Netherlands Antilles – are often referred to as ‘the Tuvalu effect’.

But perhaps the best-known and most notorious case of all concerns Guantánamo: the United States continues to detain suspected terrorists and enemy combatants in ‘legal limbo’ on its sprawling 115 km² island base at Guantánamo Bay, an enclave on the island of Cuba, granted in perpetual lease to the US under the 1903 Cuban–American Treaty (Supreme Court of the United States 2004). In choosing a place that is physically outside the nation itself, the US administration has kept various arrested persons ‘abroad in a cynical attempt to delocalise liability on the use of torture’ (Bigo 2007: 19). Guantánamo Bay has effectively been crafted as a ‘juridical limbo’, a ‘zone of indetermination’, a ‘carefully constructed legal absence’ and a field of experimentation because it is a threshold where the border between inside and outside is uncertain (Bigo 2007: 17–18, Butler 2002, Fletcher 2004, Reid-Henry 2007: 630). Guantánamo has become ‘an ambiguous space both inside and outside different legal systems’ (Kaplan 2005: 833). This situation recalls that of refugees (mainly from Haiti, but also from Cuba itself) held at Guantánamo Bay in the 1980s and early 1990s: they were denied any rights to appeal for asylum on the grounds that they were in a ‘lawless enclave’ outside US jurisdiction (Kaplan 2005: 839, McBride 1999). In spite of promises by the US Obama administration to close it down, Guantánamo Bay persists as a ‘legal black hole’ (Lopez 2010).

This collection

This edited collection is the first ever focused study of the intriguing and unique political economy of these rare, shared island spaces. It examines the fascination, and obsession, with islands as unitary geographies and polities, and explores the tensions in contemporary ‘divided islands’ – as in the case of formal and informal, legal and illegal ‘border crossings’ and practices – from both an ‘island studies’ and an ‘international relations’ perspective. It also offers comparative insights that can be considered by scholars of other divided but non-island territories, such as Palestine, Korea and Somalia.

This collective work provides an interesting twist to the post-colonial experience. Admittedly, ‘[i]sland stories have tended to slip the net of postcolonial theorising’ (Edmond and Smith 2003: 5). But, even within islands, the stories of these ten are even more exceptional. Some of the largest of these – New Guinea, Borneo and Hispaniola, but also Timor – were long fragmented into separate kingdoms or tribal chiefdoms before the onset of Western colonialism. In their case, it was the lingering presence of more than one colonial power that eventually led to a reduction of polities to the current two-way division (and the three-way split for Borneo). But, in most cases ‘[w]hat becomes clear . . . is that each of [the world’s divided islands] became divided after interference from the outside, be this colonialism, migration, or invasion – sometimes all three’ (Royle 2001: 152). The territories involved – with the exception of French St. Martin/Dutch Sint Maarten, each of which remains totally disinterested in independence – have had not just to contend w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps and Tables
• Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Only Ten: Islands as Uncomfortable Fragmented Polities
• 2. Coherent Unity or Fracture and Flow? The Problematic Island Polity
• 3. New Guinea
• 4. Borneo (Including Sebatik)
• 5. Timor
• 6. Cyprus
• 7. Ireland
• 8. Usedom/Uznam
• 9. Hispaniola
• 10. Saint-Martin/Sint Maarten
• 11. Tierra del Fuego
• 12. Bolshoi Ussuriiski/Heixiazi
• 13. Britain: The Fractured Island
• Index