The 20th century left a contradictory legacy in the form of bloody wars and universal principles for the international community to prevent them. But two of these most important principles – self-determination of peoples and territorial integrity – are in constant dialectical tension, which has no absolute and universal solution, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Anton Bespalov.
The twentieth century, a period of unprecedented turbulence, witnessed historical processes without parallel in the human experience. Among these was the emergence of an extraordinary number of new nation-states. Upon its foundation, each state acquires a national territory – an indispensable condition for its existence. Yet, the question of its boundaries remains one of the most contentious issues, both before and after its creation. While the natural aspiration of any state is to secure “fair” borders, the methods by which their fairness was determined throughout the past century offer critical lessons for the present era.
In the twentieth century, three distinct periods of active emergence of new states can be distinguished, differing in content and duration. The first is the collapse of empires as a result of the First World War, which led to the emergence of several states in Eastern Europe and quasi-states (mandate territories) in the Middle East. The second is the granting of independence to colonies of European countries, a process which saw more than eighty new states established in 1945-1985. The year 1960 (the “Year of Africa”) went down in history, when seventeen former European colonies gained independence, but during this period, years when no new states emerged were rather rare. Finally, the third is the collapse of the USSR, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in 1991-93.
The requirement for fairness of the established borders of new European states was implicit in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which partly formed the basis for the decisions of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919-20. While Wilson’s idealistic vision of international order was met with scepticism by Old World powers, they could not ignore the agenda of their key ally. As a result, some borders in Eastern Europe (for example, the Polish-German border) were drawn taking into account the ethnic principle and the resolution of disputes by plebiscite, while others were based on purely strategic considerations (the Treaty of Trianon closed the possibility for Hungary to re-emerge as a significant power in the region, while simultaneously creating the problem of Hungarian minorities in neighbouring countries). Ultimately, the boundaries of these new states reflected above all the will of the great powers – sometimes aligning with local aspirations, but often overriding them.
At the same time, the great powers’ commitment to establishing “fair borders” diminished sharply the further one moved from Europe. In the Middle Eastern territories formerly held by Turkey, borders were determined based on secret agreements between France and Britain on the division of spheres of influence (the Sykes-Picot Agreement). And the former German colonies in Africa, despite their new status of mandate territories, actually turned into colonies of the victorious powers, with some of them (Togoland and Cameroon) ending up partitioned among them as mere spoils of war.
As for Russia, despite its de facto defeat in World War I and the devastation of civil war, it succeeded – unlike other multinational empires – in preserving the bulk of its former imperial territory, reconstituted as a union of Soviet republics. The borders with the five new states along its western frontier, often dismissively termed “limitrophes,” were determined through conventional means: via peace treaties that brought armed conflicts to a formal close.
Meanwhile, the very configuration of the union of Soviet republics assumed the establishment of new administrative – but potentially state – borders between them. Despite the de facto unitary nature of the USSR, the elements of statehood that were endowed to its constituent republics would later ensure the emergence of real states on its ruins – with borders drawn as administrative ones in the 1920s – 1930s.
It is noteworthy that the borders established in Paris for the new states of Eastern Europe – intended to prevent revanchism – instead fuelled it throughout the interwar period and were ultimately redrawn on the eve and during the Second World War. Unlike after the First World War, no new states emerged in Europe following the Second; instead, the issue of territorial fairness was resolved in a radical manner. The victorious powers no longer relied on ethnic considerations when drawing borders; rather, ethnic boundaries were forcibly aligned with new political frontiers. What had occurred spontaneously after the First World War – such as the brutal Greek-Turkish population exchange – became a coordinated policy of the great powers aimed primarily at addressing Europe’s most destabilizing problem – the German question – as well as other volatile issues, such as the Polish-Ukrainian dispute. In effect, the old principle of cuius regio, eius religio was reconceived as cuius regio, eius natio.
While it did not lead to the creation of new states in Europe, World War II, it acted as a decisive catalyst for decolonization across the regions now referred to as the Global South. Viewed
from a broader perspective, in the vast majority of cases, particularly in Africa, the borders of the new states coincided with the administrative boundaries drawn by European colonizers, who generally ignored ethnic, linguistic, and religious factors.
The young African states consciously chose to follow the principle of uti possidetis, which involves transforming existing administrative boundaries into state borders. This principle, first widely used in the decolonization of Spanish America in the 19th century, was intended to prevent territorial disputes that would inevitably arise from attempts to draw “fair” borders that take into account the ethnic and religious affiliations of the population. The 1964 Cairo Declaration of the Organization of African Unity (which would later become the African Union), solemnly proclaimed that member states “pledge themselves to respect the borders existing on their achievement of national independence.”
The application of the uti possidetis principle did not save African countries from territorial disputes and wars. But all of them became the exception rather than the rule: the most striking examples here are the Ogaden War, caused by Somali irredentism, and the annexation of the former Spanish Sahara by Morocco. Another important thing is that attempts at secession based on the right of peoples to self-determination from the very beginning met with fierce resistance from the central governments of young African states, and only in two cases (Eritrea and South Sudan) were they crowned with success – after many years of armed struggle.
In the Global South as a whole, in cases where the borders of new states were decided by force, a distinct phenomenon emerged: demarcation lines that ossify into long-standing de facto frontiers. The Line of Control (LOC) between India and Pakistan and the Line of Actual Control (LAC) between India and China – both reflecting complex, unresolved territorial disputes that periodically erupt into armed confrontation – exhibit a remarkable persistence. This same resilience characterizes the demarcation line between the two Koreas.
Although references to the principle of uti possidetis are rarely heard in relation to countries in the Global North, in many cases the territorial integrity of states is understood as being based on it. This applies above all to the third wave of new state formation in the 20th century – in 1991-93. Although the collapse of the USSR was accompanied by the emergence of secessionist entities, in the 1990s, interstate borders drawn on the basis of inter-republican borders were, in the vast majority of cases, not contested by anyone.
The peace settlement in Bosnia and Herzegovina assumed the use of the uti possidetis principle in relation to its external borders, which meant preventing the implementation of the ideas of both Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia. Nevertheless, this state looks extremely fragile even thirty years after the signing of the Dayton Agreement. Meanwhile, Western powers that recognize Kosovo’s independence affirm the boundaries of the former autonomous province within socialist Yugoslavia as inviolable state frontiers, while simultaneously rejecting as unacceptable any attempt to detach its northern region – the only area where Serbs form a majority.
It should be noted that in practice, Russia also supports the principle of uti possidetis. After the recognition of the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008, Georgian troops were expelled from the areas of the two republics that remained under Georgian control after the Georgian-Abkhaz and Georgian-South Ossetian conflicts of the early 1990s (the Kodori Gorge and the Leningor District, respectively). Thus, today the territory controlled by the authorities of the two countries coincides with the territory of the former Abkhaz ASSR and the South Ossetian Autonomous Region.
A curious incident took plaсe in March 2014, when Russian military personnel set up a checkpoint on the Arabat Spit, several kilometers north of the administrative border of the Republic of Crimea. In December of the same year, Russian troops were withdrawn behind the now state border of the Russian Federation, and until September 2022, Russia recognized the north of the Arabat Spit as the only part of the Crimean Peninsula under the sovereignty of Ukraine. In turn, the accession of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics along with the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions to Russia was formally carried out within the administrative borders that existed in 1991. But, as far as prospects for a peaceful settlement of the conflict in Ukraine are concerned, its current dynamics suggest that a demarcation line similar to the Indo-Pakistani one is one of the most realistic options.
The twentieth century left a contradictory legacy in the form of bloody wars and universal principles for the international community to prevent them. But two of the most important of these principles – self-determination of peoples (Article 1 of the UN Charter) and territorial integrity (Article 2 of the UN Charter) – are in constant dialectical tension, which has no absolute and universal solution. The principle of uti possidetis has proven its usefulness in the African context, but elevating it to an absolute in Europe is fraught with the emergence of new conflicts. By the end of the century, bringing ethnic borders into line with state borders might have seemed an inhumane and archaic method of resolving long-standing contradictions, but in the 1990s it happened in the Serbian Krajina, and in the 2020s – de facto in Nagorno-Karabakh. Demarcation lines, which are temporary by nature, can exist for decades. All this reflects the complexity and diversity of the world: universal rules do not mean universal solutions, and configurations that are optimal from the point of view of the capabilities of states for development and the preservation of human lives are not necessarily “fair”. Perhaps this is the main lesson of the twentieth century in terms of drawing the borders of new states.
