The tooth fairy and the traditionality of modernity

I’ll throw in the comedic take in this stuff: http://tinyurl.com/25dspf8

I can certainly agree that what people call tradition is largely and usually something invented or continually reconstituted.

But I have trouble understanding how we can go about proving, for example, that “we are now living in a society that’s far more tradition-bound than that of the 19th Century, and in some respects more so than at any time since at least the Middle Ages.” I imagine there are different ways one can measure degrees of “tradition boundedness” but I imagine that there is a lot that’s unknowable or not easily knowable.

I’ll have to state upfront one of my biases: I tend to believe that persistence is stronger than most historians seem to acknowledge. Where others see change, I have a tendency to see continuity. Perhaps I have this bias because in my area of study, the late 19th and early 20th century US, it’s easy to see change and harder to see continuity, and my contrarian streak pushes me in the other direction.

Z, that’s very interesting. Is there a good book or article on this?

Of course, this is the opposite of the usual story in which technology drives us to a postmodern condition of constant change.

To the extent that precision about this term is possible, I think what you describe is precisely the postmodern condition: the feeling that everything important has long since been fixed, that we are post-everything. There can be no successors to Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean because in these latter days we are incapable of creating that kind of un-selfconcious standard, tradition, etc. One of the most overused words (in the US anyway) is ‘classic’, and not just as a marketing sort of word. Whatever old crap you used to put up with (luridly yellow, unsubtly-flavored American mustard, for example) is now referred to as ‘classic’. “Remember when we ate that yellow crap? Man, those were the days!”. Nostalgia sets in so fast that I sometimes worry past and present are going to smack each other in the head, as it were.

Fascinating post.

The recipes are a good example, because they focus attention on the material basis of this allegedly novel cultural traditionalism. The proliferation of industrially manufactured products combined with the availability of goods in global trade appears to be the basis for beginning the modern form of traditions. You can not have a Superbowl tradition until you have professional sports. You cannot have a tradition of sending greeting cards until you have a postal service and cheap pre-paid postage.

It is the multiplication of traditions with the proliferation of artifacts that’s new. And that proliferation of categorical artifacts did reach its maximal pace during the Second Industrial Revolution, even if the pace of technical change has continued to accelerate. That continued acceleration, with artifacts that fit the “old” categories — a cellphone is still a phone –may be undermining that sense of permanence, which traditions affirm, discomfiting us in subtle almost unconscious ways.

JWMason: Rachel Laudan’s Cusine and Empire. Some of her essays: http://www.rachellaudan.com/culinary-history

Have faith in your cooks. A polenta made with maize instead of ground chestnuts is still polenta, Clemenza’s tomato sauce may be an American degeneracy, or roba del Sud, come la mafia, orphaned on another continent, but there’s still a continuity that you can trace through the centuries. A couple of years ago I did a sauce — a paste, rather — for dressing grilled lamb that came directly from a 2,000 year-old Roman recipe. A bit heavy for modern tastes, I suppose, but its resemblance to modern curry pastes, soffritto, tagine seasonings, and Pueblan moles was undeniable.

La plus ça change….

even if the pace of technical change has continued to accelerate

But has it?

Am I the only one who finds this totally depressing if true? (And it probably is true, isn’t it?)

“we are now living in a society that’s far more tradition-bound than that of the 19th Century”

I don’t find it all that depressing because I don’t think it is really true. I just finished the Hobsbawm and Ranger and another associated book on invented traditions of Japan last month.

The important point is that “invented tradition” as described in the post was a very specifically modern phenomenon, a condition and tool possibly spontaneous and inevitable of mass production, mass consumption, mass communication. That, Fordism, is over, those societies are disaggregating, and most of the instititutions structures and traditions of the nation-state era are becoming irrelevant, optional, or situational. I wonder what the Nielson numbers on Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade were last year. Do they still show the “Wizard of Oz” annually?

Yet, if you look away from the macro-level and meta-narratives to the micro or meso levels, are traditions being invented on the Internet, blogosphere, MMORPGs? If Foucault and Deleuze are right, and we are moving via neoliberalism from discipline to control at the state and meta-social level, what now are the self-disciplining micro-social structures and mechanisms that may have taken their place?

The post-modernists and post-structuralists not only aren’t stupid or baroque, they are essential to understanding our disaggregated disassociated disintegrated fragmented world.

JW Mason @ 16

Yes.

Defining “technic” as having to do with applied and industrial sciences, the underpinning crafts and methods by which we make the artifacts of civilization, yes, technical change continues to accelerate. I understand the argument that the Second Industrial Revolution created a lot of new product categories: airplanes, telephones, automobiles, cinema, radio & television, electric everything, petroleum power on a huge scale, etc. In terms of product category novelty, the pace of change was remarkable in the late 19th and early 20th century. And, the rapid pace of change was given considerable cultural notice, as befits any developments requiring new language.

But, technical change isn’t restricted to, or well measured by reference to product category novelty, which is really just naming things. Technical change doesn’t occur until it reaches people, as more than a name, and technical change can take place, even when we keep the name.

Technique is how we make things, how we control production processes, how we design things. On that level, we constantly reinvent everything in the process of continually reproducing the material basis of civilization. That pace of reinvention, embedded in material reproduction, is the pace of technical change, and that pace has been accelerating. We reinvent and re-architect the systems of industrial production on shorter and shorter cycles, even as the scale of those systems has grown to global scale, so that those changes encompass the lives of vastly more and diverse people.

Watt’s steam engine, conventionally taken as a marker for the industrial revolution, and celebrated as such in his own time, was developed over many years, with Watt taking breaks as long as half-a-decade to make a living or wait for solutions to fabrication problems. When the extended patents expired and he retired around 1800, there were fewer than 500 Watt steam engines in use throughout the world, and a several hundred more of the much older Newcomen design. The industrial revolution — which had been underway at least since Watt’s steam engine debuted and the Bridgewater Canal opened, driving down the price of coal at Manchester around 1765 — can scarcely be detected in statistics of world output before about 1820.

The telephone, by conventional reckoning, was invented around 1875, given immediate cultural notice, by being exhibited at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876. Alexander Graham Bell installed a telephone in the White House, at a time, when the entire D.C. subscriber base was less a hundred people. A whole panoply of technologies had to be invented, complemented by political organization (the public utility, AT&T, etc) over the course of the following 50 years, as the switched phone systems developed. As late as 1930, the capacity for transatlantic telephone communication was limited to the low double-digits. Wired, switched systems spread throughout the world — even France eventually had a working system. Whole occupational categories came and went — switchboard operator, for example. And, in recent years, we’ve completely replaced those systems with systems of vastly greater scale, and a completely different technical basis. Packet-switching internet and the cellphone, which are completely different technically, have largely displaced the older systems, and their reach into areas of the world, which switched wire never reached, is remarkable. The cellphone, alone, has gone through several generations of technology in less time than it took for Bell Telephone to make its phones ubiquitous in the northeast and urban U.S., and on a larger scale, encompassing the daily lives of more people across a wider swath of the globe.

I think, sometimes, we fail to appreciate how slow the pace of technical change was in the past — including how slow both diffusion and design cycles were, and how accustomed we seem to have become to discarding things entirely — technical change was rarely fast or deep enough in the past to cause older technologies to be discarded, at least not rapidly. The steam-powered ship was a development, which continued over the course of the entire long 19th century, from Fulton’s steamboats to the turbine-driven dreadnoughts, but the commercial sailing ship continued through most of the same period, although in smaller and more specialized niches. Lightbulbs didn’t eliminate candles; railroads didn’t eliminate horses; the telegraph didn’t eliminate postal mail. Yet, in our own time, we can contemplate the complete elimination of technologies. The telegraph finally died, only a few years ago. Whole categories of businesses, like record stores and video rental stores, may have come and gone in my lifetime. Newspapers, which originated in what? the 17th century or earlier, and enjoyed their greatest booms in the late 19th century and the 1920s, as the technical basis for typesetting and printing changed in radical ways, seem on the verge of extinction or re-invention, as a result of still more radical technical change.

Kindle in hand, I have to wonder about the book. Edison’s incandescent light bulb was complemented by the fluorescent, but will likely be replaced entirely by the LED. There’s a sense in which Edison’s invention, as part of the invention of the electric utility, was more epochal than the LED, but the LED’s development was faster and diffused more rapidly onto a larger scale, and so I think I am justified in reading into that example, as well as others, quickening in the pace of technical change.

The most salient developments in our time concern the computer and communications revolutions, but a steady, unrelenting pace of technical change in agriculture and manufacturing threatens to upend many of our assumptions about economic organization. Henry Ford’s assembly line was a huge boost to labor productivity, but the increases from the continued refinement and diffusion of process manufacturing has reduced employment in manufacturing to a very small proportion of the labor force. Automobiles, today, are built with very few hours of direct labor. And, that’s typical of manufactured products. The steady advance of agriculture has transformed the systems of food production and distribution over the second half of the 20th century, with the latest developments raising significant issues of safety and sustainability.

Container shipping — at its core a low tech technical change — has transformed the way railroads and ocean shipping move merchandise, largely eliminating the once numerous longshoremen. The Panama Canal, one of the most dramatic innovations of the early 20th century, has had to be rebuilt entirely, on a larger scale.

I’m not among those, who am particularly optimistic about any of this. I think the human race is more likely to be running off the cliff, than we are to be approaching the salvation of the singularity. But, the thesis of slowing technical change is just not something I can reconcile with what I observe.

There, as here in our world-cities, we find a pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of “the new style,” of “unsuspected possibilities,” theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists, weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells […] The final result is that endless industrious repetition of a stock of fixed forms which we see today in Indian Chinese and Arabian-persian art. Pictures and fabrics, verses and vessels, furniture, dramas and musical compositions–all is pattern-work. We cease to be able to date anything within centuries, let alone decades, by the language of its ornamentation. So it has been in the Last Act of all Cultures.—Oswald Spengler

Cranky German bastard. But he knew something.

… and carbonara spaghetti was invented based on the large availability of eggs and bacon in American soldiers rations in the aftermath of WWII …

Does this mean the invented dish used American, smoked bacon? (Were rations sourced from across the Atlantic, or based on generally available supplies?) And would that suggest that “correct” carbonara—with unsmoked fatty pork in the form of guanciale—is a kind of hypercorrection?

I will venture that as culture matures, it becomes more fixed in its forms. From my viewpoint, this is not so terrible of a thing, but with a unified world it will perhaps become harder for new ideas that come out of, say, the cold, rainy northwestern corner of a continent to turn the world upside down.

The thought strikes me that traditions have strong network effects, with all that that implies.

Folklorists these days speak of tradition as performance, which is continually recreated.

Not germane but I don’t know where else to post–is there some issue with the CT RSS feed? New posts don’t seem to come through when posted and then once a week or so I get a full dump. Is that by design?

@24 The Raven
Ah, Spengler. But wasn’t The Decline of the West really just a rework of Ecclesiastes? Lamentations of ennui have a long, um, tradition, I think:

All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.

All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.

What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.

Maybe we aren’t tradition-bound, but we want to be.

Technical change has continued to accelerate, but it still barely sustains the modern, and the modern’s optimistic faith in progress. Consider pictorial art; modern art starts with the advent of photography, the invention of the unblinking eye, creating the need of other creative techniques to find new rationales and purposes. Technical advance continued — daguerreotype, glass, paper, wet process, dry process, motion, color, snapshots, 35 mm motion pictures with sound, color, Kodachrome, Poloroid, television, digital, 40 megapixel smartphones, massive panoramas, HD, 4K. Predictably, the post-modern impulse, weary of the addiction to technical progress, seeks to find some way to repeat the initial high of the original novelty, to say here is a revolution equal to The Revolution. Maybe, it’s the digital — the unblinking eye confronting us with images of reality, superseded by the new fictive possibilities of Photoshop and Pixar — and then, we look back and notice that war photographers since Roger Fenton in the Crimean War have been staging the scenes they photographed.

The modern world was born in revolutions, and as miserable as some of those revolutions made the participants, they were exciting and hopeful. But, once the modern arrived on any front, though technical progress and growth might continue, the next revolution, though anticipated, never arrived. The modern just continued, and got old. Columbus discovered America for Europe, and, due to good publicity, no one got to repeat the feat. Shangri-La and El Dorado were just good stories. By the early 20th century, intrepid explorers were forced to tramp through the arctic and antarctic, “discovering” a whole lot of nothing.

When I was a child, America’s mythology was the rebel without a cause and the cowboy on the frontier. Kennedy promised a New Frontier, and an effort to go discover the moon, like we didn’t know it was there. Television was Ben Casey, Perry Mason, Gunsmoke, the Ponderosa, Andy Griffith, Ed Sullivan discovering new talent (and a never-ending parade of plate-spinning circus performers — what was that about?)

Today’s mythology is the terrorist and the dangerous political conspiracy, the serial killer, vampires and the zombie apocalypse. Of course, we’re clinging to tradition, even traditions we just made up yesterday; just below the surface is the deep fear that it is all about to crumble into cannibalism, because it is crumbling into cannibalism.

We aren’t tradition-bound. We wish we were. We’re desperate preservationists. Technical change hasn’t slowed; we wish it would, because we can see that we are passing into the real post-modern — not the nihilism of disgruntled artists, but a series of epochal milestones that change everything, just as Paxton’s Crystal Palace changed architecture or the French Revolution created the nation-state, or Salk changed the promise of medical research, but not in optimistic, progressive ways. The first, real post-modern event was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Peak oil is another. Maybe, 9/11.

http://www.amazon.com/Did-Greeks-Believe-Their-Myths/dp/0226854345

It is still a mouse that takes your tooth and gives you money in Mexico.
There’s a wonderful little corrective book – the Shock of the Old – by David edgerton, which points out that the trope all too common in histories of technology – of some ‘modern’ technology driving out older ones – simply isn’t true. My favorite instance is horses. The war in which the greatest number of horses were used, and in which the horse was all important, was WWII. Edgerton wrote the book before Osama bin Laden hi ho silvered away on his pony from tora bora, but the point stands. There are some technological paths in which a technology replaces all others, but the more usual scenario involves bricolage, the use of “older” technologies, and innovative ones. Bikes, for instance – a technology that was replaced as serious transportation by cars, or so we are told. However, the return of the bike, bike messangers, even overcrowding by bikes – viz Amsterdam – are parts of today’s landscape. I doubt that the nineteenth century “invented” tradition – rather, I think ‘modernity’ has always been much rarer than we think. Modernity is wrapped up with an absurd vision of the ‘advanced’ West and the savage other, but the beliefs of the Nahua in the 16th century about the ability of certain people to transform themselves into animals was the same belief that surfaces in the affair of poisons that roiled Louis XIV’s court in the late seventeenth century, among the most educated people in France. According to a study by Gregg,Winer, Cottrell, Hedman, & Fournier in 2001, 40 – 60 percent of college students surveyed believed in the some form of extramission by the eyes – that is, that eyes produce ‘rays”, a theory of vision that was officially ended, in intellectual history, by the Renaissance. When you have an educated group who actually believe eyes emit things, well, the question of tradition or non-tradition becomes minor.

roger gathman-
When you have an educated group who actually believe invisible creatures surround us, exercising influence on our well-being, some for good some for ill, the question of tradition or non-tradition becomes equally minor.
Unless we’re talking about bacteria.
The brain emits measurable waves of radiation, it seems plausible that could be focused through the eyes. Maybe our instrumentation isn’t precise enough yet to catch that.
“Feed a cold, starve a fever” was ridiculed publicly, in commercials on TV a while ago, creating, intentionally, confusion about which condition should be fed or starved, in order to sell an anti-pyretic drug. But it was a medically accurate folk tradition. Traditionally helpful, easily remembered, and gone.
Until we have an accurate story about the essential nature and hardware of consciousness, it seems hollow and arrogant to dismiss anything and everything about it that doesn’t fit the current, seriously incomplete, models. Including shape-shifting, which is probably more about perception than actual transmogrification.

@26 @Pierre As a quantitative measure, you could look at the frequency and significance of changes in national boundaries. As I say in the post, my impression is that they used to be common and have become vanishingly rare, except in the form of federal states breaking up and the special confederal case of the EU.

John, that’s an interesting idea for measuring it. Do you have any specific work in mind where someone has done this? It seems like a lot would depend on your definitions. The British Empire, one boundary or many? One big country splitting up get the same weight as two little countries joining up? Also what you consider the past.

Lots of countries appeared in the post-colonial period. Lots of them disappeared after the Franco-Prussian war. That Russian empire was also patched together from various principalities, dukedoms, free cities, not to mention khanates and chiefdoms, just back then people didn’t bother drawing borders. Similar things happened in Sub Saharan Africa.

I’d guess that taking a bigger view it’s probably more of an ebb and flow kind of thing.

Andreas Wimmer has done something similar, I think*, if I know what you all are talking about

http://www.princeton.edu/~awimmer/

* Ive only read bits and pieces, so maybe not

46, don’t blame me for that hollowness and arrogance, blame the 13th century physicians. I’m sure that x rays do come out of our eyes – I mean, I am versed in the annals of Superman, plus I remember those ads in the back of comic books where rays come out of your eyes and you can hypnotize people – but I’ve never come across the marvelous explanation that it must be the leaking radiation from our brain.
In my humble opinion, however, if I were you, I would not become an opthamalogist. You would be exhausted fighting the brute prejudices of that group.

Incidentally, I think you are being a bit arrogant yourself if I read you correctly about the so called “brain mind”. The Egyptians didn’t think that the brain had anything to do with our thinking, so why should you? The advance of science has been showing, in certain laboratories (hidden underground of course) that the brain can be taken out of people and they think just like they always did.

We’re consuming tradition, like a furnace consumes fuel

Sam Bowles, Is Liberal Society a Parasite on Tradition? His answer is no, but the interesting thing is the question.

Roger Gathman 52 at 11:16 pm-

Hollow, arrogant, and scornfully contemptuous. Each step of the way from the Enlightenment, or whatever it was. The tipping point when the artificial superstitions of the immediate past were made to represent the entirety of received human tradition, and beaten down with logic and reason.
It’s not in what I said anywhere that there’s any validity to claims of anything that you would call “paranormal”.
Only the plausibility of things your science hasn’t got to yet.
Not that I’m not making those claims, just not to you, not here.
All I’m interested in in a discussion about these things with you is that your position be exposed for what it is.
You’re the present representative of a priesthood, and a congregation, that gets its status from being right about the earth going around the sun.
Because the logical assumption of earlier observing minds would lead to that not being the case. The moon and the sun seem to be doing the same thing in the sky. The same size. Going around the earth.
Of course this isn’t true, but when there’s contempt for people who thought that, I see danger. Treating mistaken conclusions as dogma, and punishing people who thought otherwise, sure the resistance to that is important, even at times heroic.
I’m not unaware that Kepler’s mother was tried for witchcraft. But your scorn has more in common with her accusers than Kepler himself, going to her defense.
Lots of us were raised on this half-stepping arrogance. But some of us have noticed that the substance of consensus position keeps shifting with newer and more accurate data. That’s fine and as it should be, but where’s the humility?
You’re leveling scorn at me because it’s all you know how to do. You know nothing about what I believe, but you bounce right into contempt for things I must subscribe to, because in your autistic rationalist community there’s no other place for that to come from. It’s polarized and two-dimensional, and in my case woefully unfounded.
For the entire history of the accumulation of scientific knowledge until a scant hundred years ago, there was no working concept of how full the invisible microbial reality is, and it was there the whole time. It’s where we are, and it was invisible to us.
Humility, Roger.
There’s a lot more still out there that we can’t see.

Roger Gathman-

I’m convinced that with a little effort I could goad you into a spasm of supercilious disdain that would reveal the vindictive rage underneath that snotty complacency for what it is.
But I can’t, for the life of me, figure out a way to do it that doesn’t require lowering myself to a state of mind that would inevitably trigger my own self-loathing.

In some ways true. In others less so. One thing that springs to mind is the collapse of the nuclear family as a norm, and the associated collapse of family as a formal factor in politics and other social organisation. The norm of a core family of parents and dependent children as a unit is very old in western Europe (although it had competing norms – the extended family networks of the gentry and the loose associations of the poor). Similarly the notion of political and social leadership as a family inheritance is very old. But both have seriously weakened over the last 50 years – a very short time for so large a change. Even in the US, that most traditional of societies.

A second major change is the weakening of religion as a central identifying point. Again, something normal 50 years ago, and age-old as a tradition. But now pretty much gone outside the US, and fading even there.

On political units, the changes have probably been greater than JQ posits. There have probably been around 100 new political units come into being in the last 50 years. Some are revivals, but most are the inventions of empires and commissars, and often have very weak connections with the past (not that that stops them inventing traditions as fast as possible, in the best C19 fashion).

@49 Bruce ‘Maybe we aren’t tradition bound, but want to be.’

I’d put that this way: maybe we are nostalgic for an imagined time when the canonical was self evident and unquestioned, the apocryphal safely banished to the shadows. And from this nostalgia for a fairy tale past, we create, where and when we can, rigid micro-orthodoxies (traditional marriage, traditional families, manifold varieties of traditional aesthetics, and so on) as a way of stabilizing the shaky, very conditional ground upon which the possibility of the canonical stands.

But this doesn’t go far enough. If, for the radical, the canonical stands as an impediment to progress (‘The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare upon the brain of the living’), it also serves as a means (‘And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.’) When the canonical becomes self conscious and riddled with doubt, much of its value to the revolutionary is lost as well.

But the problem goes still further. Because not only have the canons of the bible, classical antiquity, and nationalism become relativized and questionable, so to has the canon of the Enlightenment, of reason itself. Where does one ground a dialectic of progress when reason has eaten its own tail?

And here, I think, we stand — looking back with nostalgia toward a time when the canonical was self evident (or at least we imagine it thus), and looking forward to a time when the canonical is without the gravitas necessary to hold any kind of coherent cosmos together, and certainly too weak to smash the hold of actually existing capitalism (think Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being), or perhaps the situation of the three protagonists in Sartre’s Huis clos).

For my own part, I find this lightness beautiful. The weakness of the canonical enhances the importance of the apochryphal, the uncertainty of the orthodox makes for a blossoming of heterodoxies. Or at least the possibilities are open: to enhance the interstitial, to leaven the heavy dough of late industrial modernism.

There is a famous (US) National Park Service brochure that talks about how everything you see around you is the result of mighty, slow, imperceptible forces working ever-so-gradually over eons . . . and then, in the very next paragraph, mentions that a particular natural arch had collapsed suddenly in a rainstorm a few years earlier. A lot of our perception of stasis comes down to a failure of imagination: most things end suddenly, for previously unforeseen causes, and so at any given moment they seem imperishable.

I’m told hats went away suddenly because of JFK; I saw business suits (in the ordinary walks of white-collar life, outside the courtroom and boardroom) go away suddenly in about an 18-month period just before the peak of the dot-com boom, and not come back. My childhood memories of downtown Boston are heavily infused with the sights and smells of important men (my father’s partners and clients) in slightly rumpled gray wool, rushing into the warmth of slightly rumpled dining rooms that had seen four or five generations of the same crowd. Wanting to convey this timelessness to my daughter, I found that in just the last decade they’ve all closed or become tourist experiences; partners at (no longer literal) white-shoe law firms eat Thai food like the rest of us.

If you could do an objective and quantitative pedigree of “traditions,” I expect you’d find a power-law spectrum like any other instance of Per Bak’s self-organized criticality, with a steady slope and avalanches at all scales. Even in the geopolitical realm, the 1815-1914 and 1945-present periods may reflect nothing more than scaling laws at work and our subjective handicaps in extrapolating them.

And, by the way, Israel’s border with Jordan moved in several places when that peace treaty was signed in 1994.

The Myth of the Holy Cow
by D. N. Jha

I have never read Stephen Mennell’s book on the development of French and English cuisine, but it looks very interesting indeed.

I haven’t read every word of the thread but would like to chime in on state/natl boundaries, since that’s something I happen to know something about.

Doug M. @61 fails to distinguish between changes in location of boundaries and changes in status of boundaries. South Sudan 2011, for ex., is a change of status not location: afaik, an existing regional boundary was made into a national one. Ditto, e.g., Hong Kong 1997 (no change in boundary location, only status) and Kosovo 2008 (no change in location, afaik, only status).

It is significant changes in the location of boundaries, accomplished by force (or other means), that have become very rare in the post-1945 period. The evidence on this is indisputable. There is a literature on this, one place to start being Zacher’s 2001 article on the territorial integrity norm in the journal International Organization.

TM @74

On boundaries: I think you’re wrong, J.Quiggin’s right. See my comment @73. I have no interest in linking this to a”traditionality of modernity” thesis, but on the factual question of the stability of boundaries post-1945, the evidence is clear. (It has to do w, inter alia, the fact that territorial conquest has become rare. Which has to do w other things that wd take too long to go into.)

LFC, the problem with that thesis is that people in 1890 might very well have made the same claim, and probably would have had a better empirical case. Surely, the period from 1850-1890 must have appeared extraordinarily stable compared to the centuries before. Basing any “historical trend” argument on a period that short is just a recipe to be proved wrong.

As to the argument about location vs. status, well maybe but border changes in earlier times didn’t come out of the blue either. They tended to follow preexisting divisions.

And finally, there is a somewhat similar claim about language being more stable today than in earlier times. The printed word and near-universal literacy certainly has a bearing on this but as always there is also a perceptual bias. In the past, the rate of language change wasn’t fixed and neither should we expect this to be the case today.

TM @78
the problem with that thesis is that people in 1890 might very well have made the same claim, and probably would have had a better empirical case. Surely, the period from 1850-1890 must have appeared extraordinarily stable compared to the centuries before. Basing any “historical trend” argument on a period that short is just a recipe to be proved wrong.

Some caution is in order about extrapolating too far out from trends, e.g., of the past half-century or seventy years, yes. That said, there are differences between the period 1850-1890 and, say, the last half-century. But I’m not inclined to go much further into this, both for reasons of time and because experience suggests that this is a topic on which people’s minds don’t change. The people who think the basic features of int’l politics haven’t changed since 1890 will think what they think, and the people who think that significant things have changed since 1890 will think what they think, and everyone can argue himself or herself blue in the face and in the end it won’t make any difference b/c no one’s mind will be changed. I do have one figure easily to hand, though, fwiw: Between 1648 and 1945, the percentage of armed conflicts resulting in the redistribution of territory — i.e., the redrawing of boundaries — is “consistently between 77 percent and 82 percent; between 1945 and 1996, it is 23 percent.” (M. Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention, p.126, citing a 1997 paper by R. Jackson and M. Zacher)

I thought there might be something to the original tradition – border argument.

Feudal notions of sovereignty and property gave borders a different meaning, which was infused with antiquarian history and tradition, in a . . . traditional sense. The advent of political modernity changed all that.

Any good history of the French Revolution tries — and generally fails — to convey the complexity of jurisdiction, which was the ancien regime. The Napoleonic Wars initiated the process of extinguishing a similar complexity across Germany and Italy, which culminated in their emergence as nation-states. After that, that kind of politics of borders was largely confined to the mess, which was Austria-Hungary.

It is difficult to imagine something like the Schleswig-Holstein Question being taken seriously today. It was difficult for the statesman of Europe to deal with it, with a straightface, in the mid-19th century. That’s what borders, frozen by tradition, looked like.

The two World Wars reflected how much the game changed as the dynastic claims of petty monarchs were replaced by the more passionate claims of mass nationalism, but much of the patchwork of populations and languages and religions, which disturbed the nationalists, was . . . changed. I think it’s fair to say many, though not all, of those nationalist questions were settled, by the movement of populations. Does the resolution of a political question — even a violent resolution — result in time and forgetfulness or selective remembering, in a tradition?

A peaceful federalism, as in the EU structure, makes it possible to contemplate a Slovenia or a Scotland or a Catalonia. Why not, if military conflict isn’t an issue and customs union and globalization reduces the economic cost?

Is modernity, having banished the old traditionalism, and with nationalism mellowing, becoming, itself, “traditionalist” in some way with respect to borders?

I’d like to see more “micro-founded” data being brought to bear. Linguistically, for example, which was once a key issue for the nationalists, with a sense of history. The Irish school their children in Gaelic, for example. There can’t be 50,000 speakers of gaelic in Scotland, and scots — the native tongue of Adam Smith — what happened to that? The Walloons had a very distinctive language, once, but my impression is that it is gone, submerged into a more standard French. Italy fashioned a standard Italian as a symbol of nationalism. Turkey adopted a Roman alphabet, jettisoning the Arabic script. Are the festering border issues in eastern Europe conforming to linguistic reality or historical tradition? Moldova? Transnistria?

83: An Irish Skynet bent on world conquest? Shouldn’t they work on a national cuisine first?

National cuisine? Nah, when we’re in charge, we’ll just eat yours.

Same as we do now.

“It is difficult to imagine something like the Schleswig-Holstein Question being taken seriously today.”

It is difficult to imagine something like the Falklands Question being taken seriously today. And there are plenty of other territorial disputes, some of them quite serious (e. g. Cjina and Japan). Do these disputes reflect a 19th century attitude towards territoriality? Hell no. Nobody in their right mind would claim that “the basic features of int’l politics haven’t changed” etc. etc. But on the other hand, to claim that we now live in an age of peace and stability without the petty rivalries of times past is quite astonishing. At the very least, such extraordinary claims require more than a few cherry-picked data points.

“I think it’s fair to say many, though not all, of those nationalist questions were settled, by the movement of populations.” Oh yeah? What do you think is going on in Kiev right now? Not to mention myriad conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, Asia? This is exactly the attitude I mentioned in 73 – Westerners pontificating about how everybody has finally settled into homogenous nation-states (and how it’s all for the better despite the ugly history that brought us here), except that the vast majority of humanity don’t live in that kind of nation-state.

TM@73
totally oblivious to the fact that most UNO members are not by any stretch of the imagination nation-states

The phrase “nation-state” is often used in journalistic and other discussions (though clearly you aren’t using it this way) as a synonym for “sovereign state” (i.e., “country” in more common everyday parlance), and the claim that sovereign states are the basic units of present-day pol. org. is fairly banal and that might well have been all that the Harpers piece meant.

the very “tradition” of “national boundaries” is itself very recent (19th century).
This is really not right, except possibly on an *extremely* narrow definition of “national boundaries,” and probably not even then.

” And who are those people?”

Jesus Christ, half the academy dont think anythings changed since the Peloponnesian War

“..half the academy *doesn’t* think anything*’s* changed since the Peloponnesian War..”

When did my typing become so guttural ?

ps

this:

“What do you think is going on in Kiev right now? Not to mention myriad conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, Asia? ”

Is wrong, man. Or at least half the story.
I’m not fully following your argument or the main one re traditions being possibly quantificationally measured through border changes etc, but *these are not ‘nationalist’ conflicts* (or at least not in the Middle East, doubtfully in Kiev,and I don’t know the ‘Asia’ or ‘Africa’ references – they’re big places ! – maybe some are, maybe some aren’t, who knows ?)

TM @ 88

I get that you are angry. Other than that you don’t seem to have a point.

@Joshua W. Burton

I’ve long felt that the abrupt and complete disappearance of the hat to be a historical landmark of a significance that eluded contemporary observers and hindsight equally. In the whole of human history down to the eye blink that is modernity such an event would have caused concern or even fear among the ruling classes. What did it mean? What power could bring about such a thing? And what other havoc would this power wreak?

It was a dramatic event. The apparent triviality of its effects are an illusion: neither Kennedy nor Kruschev had the power either to order it or to obstruct it, and its mysterious propagation, leaving everything else untouched like a sort of neutron bomb for hats, incomprehensible.

What did it signify? Well (amongst other things) within a decade there was Woodstock and a few years later again tens of thousands of people assembled fully expecting that “the Houston Astrodome will physically separate itself from the planet which we call earth and will fly”. Such events really did inspire fear and the inevitable reaction wasn’t far off: Reagan. The disappearance of the hat didn’t cause these events but they were all manifestations of the same forces.

When Einstein made sense of a handful of anomalies seemingly of no relevance the great world of industry he inhabited his insights weren’t dismissed as pointless. In a world of science an anomaly is intolerable: no matter how trivial, the no definite limit can be put on the greatness of what it signifies. But in the world of the 1960s, at the pinnacle of technological optimism when literally anything was felt to be possible, such an event could take place without the fact that it was neither anticipated nor understood bothering anybody.

And to this day the technocrats cruise serenely onwards, oblivious to the fact that their thinking is at least a century out of date. They still inhabit a Newtonian world of mechanistic causes and effects that only ever requires a little further elaboration to be perfected. That this goal isn’t remotely feasible doesn’t bother them, and neither does the fact that they failed to anticipate a succession of human-induced disasters (the world wars, the depression, etc) in spite of having been warned about their causes and consequences in advance.

Also strike the “that” from “I’ve long felt that the abrupt…” in #100.

LFC: The status/location distinction, while real, has a lot less power than you’re giving it.

1) If you look at those 12 examples I gave, six of them — Walvis Bay, Palau, the Canal Zone, Ligatan/Sipadan, Bakassi, and Mayotte — involved changes of border. Walvis Bay had a surveying crew out establishing the new border. With the Canal Zone, the previously existing border simply disappeared. In the case of Mayotte, the Mayottois voted to annex themselves to France. The result is that France suddenly gained a new maritime border with the Comoros, where no international border had previously existed.

If half of the significant international changes in border status in the last 20 years have also involved changes in border location, it’s a bit hard to say that border location changes are much rarer than border status changes.

2) I skipped a bunch of examples where the border actually changed but the amount of land or the number of people involved were small. But Bolshoy Ussuriysky involved redrawing an international border, and so did the Croatia-Slovenia border dispute. At a small scale (a few km here or there), borders are still regularly being adjusted in Africa and in the former Soviet republics in Central Asia.

3) It’s true that many new international boundaries were once internal. But before they became international, they shifted around a lot more. So, for instance, the current boundary of Kosovo only dates back to the 1950s — a portion of southern Serbia was grafted on to the north of the province, while the Presevo Valley was given to Serbia. (This is still very much part of living memory, btw. Kosovar Albanians still refer to this region as “East Kosovo”, and there was an armed insurgency around Presevo from 1999 to 2005.) Similarly, the border between Croatia and Montenegro was redrawn in the 1950s, leaving Kotor, a historically Croatian city, inside the modern independent nation of Montenegro. (Much to the unhappiness of Kotor’s Croats, who got ethnically cleansed out of it in the 1990s.) The internal border between Sudan and South Sudan was redrawn repeatedly in the 1970s and 1980s by the central government in Khartoum. So it’s often a bit misleading to say “oh, the new international boundary just followed a pre-existing internal border line”, because in many cases the pre-existing internal border line hadn’t pre-existed very long.

Doug M.

Doug M @104
I’m not denying that some boundary changes, i.e. of location, still occur. But some of your examples are maritime boundaries, not land — e.g. Bakassi is a peninsula, and I think Walvis Bay is also (or else it’s an outright island, I’d have to look it up) — and maritime boundaries, e.g. involving islands and peninsulas, in recent years have been generally more contested than land ones.

Of course there are still some disputed land boundaries, but some of those disputes are pretty dormant (India/China, for example). I’m also aware, in a general way, of the India/Bangladesh enclave issue, which you mentioned in passing upthread. And I’m sure there are others.

But the basic points I wd make are that (1) major land boundaries are pretty remarkably stable, partly because (2) traditional interstate wars have declined drastically, and (3) the territorial-integrity norm, i.e. the norm against territorial conquest and/or forcible, unilateral boundary change, is very robust in the current int’l system. The most serious extant interstate territorial disputes, afaik, are those betw. China and some of its neighbors over islands (Senkaku/Diaoyu [sp?], Spratleys etc). And those, while not trivial, are a pretty far cry from the kinds of disputes that characterized much of 19th and first half of 20th cent.

Pdf of Zacher, “The Territorial Integrity Norm”:

here

LFC 89, what I wrote and you quoted does not in any shape or form “imply a cycle thesis”. It implies nothing more or less than what I wrote, and I am tired of batting straw man arguments.

“If you don’t think “patterns recur,” then why tell me about the (alleged) stability of 1850-1890?” Because I was making a reductio ad absurdum argument: The kind of evidence that you are providing for your thesis would have worked at least as well in 1890. But your position is that your thesis wouldn’t have been valid in 1890. Therefore the evidence doesn’t support the thesis. Btw that argument doesn’t prove your thesis wrong, just that it cannot be proven by the kind of evidence you suggest (even if that evidence were uncontested, which it isn’t). I’m spelling this out in detail but honestly I have little hope that it matters to you. I’m disappointed in the incredible shallowness of this whole debate and I don’t think there’s much point in trying to continue since I don’t see much good faith on your side. The same is true of course for Bruce 96. I’ll just point you Bruce to what I said on the other thread. https://crookedtimber.org/2014/02/12/socialism-in-america/#comment-512263

Last one for LFC:
“The phrase “nation-state” is often used in journalistic and other discussions (though clearly you aren’t using it this way) as a synonym for “sovereign state” (i.e., “country” in more common everyday parlance), and the claim that sovereign states are the basic units of present-day pol. org. is fairly banal and that might well have been all that the Harpers piece meant.”
Both parts of that statement are wrong. “Nation-state” is not synonym for “sovereign state” (if it is used in that way it would be wrong) and that was not how it was meant in Harper’s.

TM 110
“The kind of evidence that you are providing…would have worked at least as well in 1890.”
I don’t think so, because of changes in the int’l system and int’l normative environment that have occurred since then. We’re going in circles here.
Anyway, I’m not trying to “prove” a “thesis.” I’m not trying to make predictions, certainly not confident predictions. I’m trying to describe the current situation and that’s pretty much all I’m trying to do.

“I’m not trying to make predictions, certainly not confident predictions.” Ok.

What I took issue with is your statement:
“on the factual question of the stability of boundaries post-1945, the evidence is clear.”

That kind of suggests that there’s instability before 1945 and stability after. I think this is misleading at best because there have been periods of relative stability before and definitely lots of instability after. I have a deep aversion against extrapolation from short trends. It happens all the time that pundits take the postwar period (especially as remembered in idealized nostalgia) as the baseline normal and expect the future to resemble it – which strikes me as very unlikely. I think that at least JQ is guilty of that (“Political systems and national boundaries are becoming more stable over time, not less.”) Similarly the Dawkins thesis of humanity becoming more peaceful over time.

Unjustified extrapolation is a very damaging intellectual fallacy leading to myopia and poor judgment. I’m afraid more instability is quite likely in store in the future although the causes (such as climate change, water scarcity, mass migration) wouldn’t be exactly the same as in the past few hundred years (this should be obvious but apparently it’s not).

@TM
One of the issues you raise — the character of the post-1945 period — is not a question of prediction or extrapolation, but a historical question. On this point I’ll quote (emphasis added) from the 2001 Zacher article (I linked the pdf @108). For the period 1946 to 2000, he counted 40 interstate wars involving territory, only 12 of which resulted in “major boundary change”:

It is clear that there have been very few [“very few” of course is imprecise — see exact figures below in this passage–LFC] cases of coercive boundary change in the last half century during which UN membership has grown from 50 to 190. No longer is territorial aggrandizement the dominant motif of interstate politics; whereas in the three centuries leading up to 1946, about 80 percent of all interstate territorial wars led to territorial redistributions, for the period 1946–2000, the figure is 30 percent (twelve out of forty) (Table 1a). Given the huge increase in the number of states in the international system in the past half century and our definition of territorial wars for the period, the absolute numbers of forty territorial wars and twelve cases of major boundary change are not very large by historical standards.

The fact that territorial aggrandizement and coercive boundary change were at what seem to be historical lows in 1946 to 2000 does not necessarily mean one can extrapolate from that period into the future. And I suppose it’s conceivable that there were 50-year spans pre-1945 when territorial aggrandizement was also very low. But when you put the figures just mentioned together with evidence of normative/legal practice at the level of declarations by intl orgs, etc., a reasonable case emerges that the post-WW2 period is different in these terms than what preceded it.

Again, I agree with you that one should be cautious about extrapolation and that prediction is hazardous. Could “territorial aggrandizement” at some point in the future again become “the dominant motif of interstate politics”? Yes, that is possible, esp. if the forces you cite such as climate change and related pressures play out in a certain way. But it does appear that so far the post-45 period has been low on territorial aggrandizement, relatively speaking. It still happens, but not as frequently. On whether this will remain the case and/or for how long, I express no opinion.

The problem with the application of statistics to international relations is that none of the phenomena are statistical in nature. You can compile figures, but any statistical inferences are invalid due to violation of the assumptions upon which those statistical methods are based.

What “statistical inferences”? I am, regrettably or otherwise, not very well versed in quantitative methods, but the “statistical methods” at issue in the quotation @116 are nothing more than defining/classifying and counting. Which some or many historians do, whether explicitly or not. You’ll see that the article, if you read or skim/glance at it, is actually full of qualitative evidence; it’s not a quant piece. It’s just that I thought the descriptive statistics were a quick way to make a point, and as far as I can see there are no “invalid inferences” here.

As to the phenomena not being “statistical in nature” — a cat is a living organism, not “statistical in nature” I suppose, but if three stray cats show up at my front door and someone asks me how many cats are at the door, I can count them and say “there are three cats here.” As a non-quant type, I am having a weird feeling being put in this position, but so be it.

Oh and btw, if you want to discuss philosophy of (social) science and IR w an expert, just call PTJ on his dedicated philosophy-of-science line. Different initials, different person than me. ;)

Averages can’t be used to bolster a forward-looking argument when they’re compiled from observations of non-probabilistic phenomena. If statistics are to be used in this context, all reference to the future (or to any inference based on mathematics, such as trends) must be excluded, but if the are excluded the statistics themselves lose all meaning.

TM @119
I guess ‘stability’ is, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder, but I assume you know that when the 20th-cent. African states became independent they took over the colonial boundaries as their international ones (as happened also in 19th-cent. Latin America). This is somewhat different from Doug M.’s caveat @104 about ‘internal’ boundaries, because I’m referring specifically to colonial ones.

— Here’s a thing: yes, the classic interstate war over territory is out of fashion at the moment. But there are still plenty of wars, and lots of changes of control over territory. We’re seeing fewer territorial wars, but more wars of regime change, and a lot more wars of secession and autonomy.

Wars of regime change are associated in the Western public mind with Iraq, but they’ve been around for a while, and almost everyone can play. People forget, but Pol Pot was overthrown by an invading army from Vietnam, Idi Amin by an invading army from Tanzania, and Mobotu Sese Seko by an invading army from Rwanda. Poor and developing countries can engage in these sorts of wars, and regularly do.

Wars of secession… see, these bleed imperceptibly into Zaher’s interstate wars. Consider South Ossetia. A small, poor mountain region, outnumbered 50 to 1 by the Georgians, it could never have gained independence from Georgia on its own. But the Russians gave the South Ossetians lavish support, up to and including deployment of Russian troops in their first independence war, and then a punitive invasion of Georgia by two Russian divisions in the second one. That’s an interstate war by any reasonable definition; most of the shooting was done by Georgians and Russians, and the outcome was the de facto annexation of South Ossetia by Russia. But Zaher doesn’t include it.

He also eliminates Armenia-Azerbaijan, and I can’t make heads or tails of that one. Clearly an interstate conflict, that war ended with Armenia occupying a fifth of Azerbaijan and claiming about half of that occupied land as Armenian. And it was the bloodiest war in the post-Soviet space to date, with 30,000 dead and almost 100,000 casualties. It’s not on Zaher’s list. He doesn’t even mention it. WTH?

So: definitional issues. They matter!

Anyway. I agree with the general point… yes, wars over territory are less common today. But (1) I’m not sure that has as much significance as people like to think, and (2) that’s not a very good paper.

Doug M.

P.s.
People forget, but Pol Pot was overthrown by an invading army from Vietnam, Idi Amin by an invading army from Tanzania, and Mobotu Sese Seko by an invading army from Rwanda.

The overthrow of Pol Pot by Vietnam (c.1978-79) and of Idi Amin by Tanzania (1979) are routinely cited, along with the Indian intervention in then-E. Pakistan (1971), as examples of Cold War-era interventions that arguably had some ‘humanitarian’ justification (though that prob. was not the main motive in any of them). Hard to forget these, since they are frequently mentioned together.

Doug M @123:
Because while Zacher gives a list, he never gives his working definitions — only that his list is “drawn from extensive research in secondary materials”.

This completely wrong. He gives his definition here:

Territorial aggressions or wars include interstate armed conflicts where a clear purpose of the military attack was the change of boundaries of a state or its colonies; the invading state sought to capture some territory from the attacked state—not merely to punish it …; attacking states were widely recognized as
sovereign states; and the invasion or occupation lasted at least a week. Using this
definition clearly reduces the value of comparisons with the pre-1946 territorial
wars, but the value of using a larger group of territorial aggressions for the recent
period greatly assists our understanding of recent changes.

Doug M.:

in the last 40 years we’ve seen several new countries created by massive, organized violence: Bangladesh, Eritrea, Kosovo, South Sudan. But since all of these arose out of civil wars, they aren’t included in the “12 out of 40″ that Zacher lists on pages 225-228 of his article. [The Bangladesh war *is* included, as I’ve already mentioned.] He also does not include various wars that ended in territorial adjustments that are real on the ground, but not recognized by the international community: Transnistria, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh. Presumably this is because these wars were not “interstate”, but that definition is a lot more slippery than Zacher would like us to think. The Yugoslav civil wars are included, presumably because they magically became “interstate” in 1992 when Croatia and Bosnia gained broad international recognition. But the equally bloody Abkhaz war is not included, presumably because only a few countries ever recognized Abkhazia. The South Ossetian conflict has given rise to not one but two wars, and has resulted in the permanent separation of South Ossetia from Georgia, and its de facto annexation by Russia. This is not included because… lack of international recognition? The Kosovo war is not included, because… actually, it’s really not clear why it’s not included. Not interstate enough, because one side was a coalition? Independent Kosovo didn’t get recognized until a few years later?

If he had included the wars you say he should have included, this would have changed the figure from 12 out of 40 to, say, 16 out of 44. I’m not sure that would make a difference in terms of the conclusions. Note, btw, that independent Kosovo was recognized in 2008, while the Zacher article was published in 2001 and the period he’s dealing with (in this part of the piece) is 1946-2000. You also want Zacher to include the Russia-Georgia war of December 2008. But again, the article was published in 2001.

The lack of widespread recognition of e.g. Abkhazia and S. Ossetia highlights a point that you don’t mention and one that supports the general thrust of Zacher’s argument: namely, states don’t generally recognize entities that result from violent secessionist movements or violent secessionist movements aided externally (e.g., in the case of Russia/Georgia/S. Ossetia). This supports his basic argument about the strength of the territorial integrity norm.

The case of Bangladesh is somewhat unusual, b.c it was a violent secession resulting in a state that subsequently did get widespread international recognition. There are a couple of other similar examples. But I don’t think South Sudan, e.g., is really in the same category. South Sudan seceded by referendum and consent: Sudan let it go. (Yes, there was a lot of violence in the background and Sudan’s options might have been limited, but it was by consent.) That’s one reason a lot of countries have recognized S. Sudan. South Ossetia was not by consent (Georgia did not agree to let it go), which is one reason virtually no states recognize South Ossetia. The case of Kosovo is arguably somewhere in the middle. Of course power politics matters in these situations (e.g. the U.S. backed S. Sudan), but the general rule seems to be states don’t like most secessionist movements and they don’t recognize most secessions unless the latter result from negotiation or referendum and mutual consent.

“states don’t generally recognize entities that result from violent secessionist movements or violent secessionist movements aided externally (e.g., in the case of Russia/Georgia/S. Ossetia).”

They generally don’t, except when they do — as in the cases of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, South Sudan, Eritrea, Bangladesh, etc.

“I don’t think South Sudan, e.g., is really in the same category. South Sudan seceded by referendum and consent: Sudan let it go. (Yes, there was a lot of violence in the background and Sudan’s options might have been limited, but it was by consent.) ”

I’m sorry, but that’s nonsense on stilts. Sudan “consented” after losing a brutal, bloody, thirty year long war against an incredibly tenacious, determined and violent set of insurgencies. They had to be militarily beaten — repeatedly — and several million people had to die, before they were willing to let South Sudan go. And even then, they “consented” only after they had already lost physical control over most of the South.

No offense, but that’s a very silly argument.

If you want a recent-ish example of secession by consent, here’s one: East Timor. Unfortunately for the East Timorese, large portions of Indonesia’s power structure did _not_ consent. But formally, yes, they were allowed to go their own way; they could never have dislodged the Indonesians militarily (they’d already given it a respectable try, and failed).

Doug M.

“The overthrow of Pol Pot by Vietnam (c.1978-79) and of Idi Amin by Tanzania (1979) are routinely cited, along with the Indian intervention in then-E. Pakistan (1971), as examples of Cold War-era interventions that arguably had some ‘humanitarian’ justification (though that prob. was not the main motive in any of them). ”

That wasn’t remotely the motive in any of them, and I’d be instantly dubious of any source that tried to claim so. Tanzania and Vietnam were both responding to deliberate provocations from their neighbors. Pol Pot thought he could win a border war because his Khmer Rouges cadres were far more disciplined than the “right-deviationist” Vietnamese. He was very, very wrong. Idi Amin wanted to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels by annexing a border province from Tanzania. He thought that (1) the President of Tanzania, mild-mannered schoolteacher Julius Nyerere, was a weakling who would fold easily, and (2) support from Moammar Qaddafi, including Libyan Army units deployed to the Uganda-Tanzania border, would make him invulnerable to counterattack. As it turned out, wrong and wrong!

Now, both of these had some positive humanitarian /outcomes/ — the Cambodians got rid of Pol Pot (they got Hun Sen instead — he’s still in power, 30+ years later, but at least he’s not a genocidal maniac) and the Ugandans got rid of Amin (though they got Milton Obote, who was only barely an improvement, in his place). But “routinely cited… as having humanitarian justifications”? I don’t think so.

Doug M.

@133: well, he says it’s the definition he’s using, unless I missed something. (How well/consistently he applied it I guess is a separate issue.)

@134: what I meant was that, in the numerous discussions of humanitarian intervention, these three cases are often lumped together or referred to together. I’m most familiar w the ’71 Bangladesh war (having recently read a bk about it and reviewed it). India’s motives there were various, notably relieving the pressure of approx. 10 million Bengali refugees who, over a course of some months, crossed the border to escape the Pakistani army. After intervening militarily in E. Pakistan, India initially offered a humanitarian-intervention justification, but this got virtually no support from other countries, so it reverted to a self-defense justification. This had at least some plausibility, given the implications of the refugee crisis and Pakistan’s launching of a pre-emptive airstrike in the West the evening before India sent its soldiers into the East.

I’m perplexed as to your intention in quoting that last remark. It’s not legally meaningful, but if legitimacy doesn’t mean legal legitimacy then what does it imply?

Doug M. seems to be getting the best of this debate.

One thing I wonder, tho — why doesn’t decolonization figure in any of these discussions? If it counts as a change in national boundaries when Bangladesh ceases to be governed from Islamabad, why not when it ceases to be governed from London? Algerian independence wasn’t a change in national boundaries carried out by force? Is the difference between “secession” and “independence” movements anything more than the difference between the US “Civil War” and the “War Between the States”?

It seems to me that if you count decolonization as a change in national boundaries — and I can’t see why you shouldn’t — then the three decades after 1945 must have the highest rate of boundary changes in history. Sovereignty over something like a third of the world’s population changed in just a couple of decades. Is there any other period that comes close?

Of course the 40 years since have been much more stable. But I don’t see a case for a secular trend in either direction, just periods of stability and periods of instability alternating in an irregular way.

What does seem probably true of the post-WWII period compared with the previous 150 or so years is that (1) the boundaries of sovereign states have quite stable in Western Europe; and (2) globally, changes in boundaries have been more often in the direction of dividing political units rather than combining them.

Joshua Burton-

OK, the post-1945 period is one of a handful of periods of very rapid changes in political boundaries; the last comparable period was the first half of the 16th century. I’ll accept that as a friendly amendment.

At 111, Doug M. wrote: “Have international boundaries become much more stable? Of course they have….”

I happily defer to Doug M. on these questions. But I wonder: (1) what period we are talking about? If we are comparing the past 20 or 30 years to earlier periods, then sure. (2) Doug M. may have considered reasons for not counting the independence of Algeria, say, as a change in national boundaries. In that case, I’d like to hear what those reasons are.

Did the boundaries change with decolonization? Yes, their status changed.

I don’t see why we should care about this distinction? Seems like scholasticism to me. And if you were consistent about this standard you would conclude that there have never been many territorial wars. Since in the majority of successful conquests, the former international boundary retains some kind of administrative status afterward.

I don’t think the norm you propose has any content. Any successful change in boundaries is recognized by some people immediately, by most people eventually, and by absolutely everyone never.

I didn’t think LFC asserted that location matters more than status, only that the distinction is descriptively useful, particularly to seeing the emergence of norms in international relations regarding territorial integrity.

Just because one is focused on whether the location of international boundaries change by force more or less frequently, or whether international conflict centers on territorial claims to a greater or lesser degree, is not a statement about the larger significance of other developments.

That decolonization left the former colonies with their colonial borders and strong norms supportive of the integrity of those borders is, arguably, a fact shaping international relations. That doesn’t mean decolonization was unimportant.

Border disputes are inherently a feature of a territorial state system. I can see why descriptively tracking the number and character of border agreement or disputes might yield some useful insight into the evolution of the system.

Bruce Wilder:
That decolonization left the former colonies with their colonial borders and strong norms supportive of the integrity of those borders is, arguably, a fact shaping international relations. That doesn’t mean decolonization was unimportant.

Exactly.

And I might mention that at least a couple of scholars have argued, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively as academics often like to do, that the very stability or rigidity of African international (interstate) boundaries in the postcolonial era has (1) made for weaker African states internally and, relatedly, (2) fueled civil wars that have sometimes become internationalized (e.g. Dem. Rep. Congo). The argument being that the near-sacrosanctness of state boundaries in modern international law and practice means that African governments have generally not needed to create strong states capable of defending their boundaries in the first instance from invasion, which, by contrast, early modern European states did have to do. (I’m not saying I agree with this argument, but it has been made and prob. has at least some plausibility.)

Did early modern European states have to defend their boundaries from invasion? Is that how it happened?

My recollection is that feudalism, where boundaries meant less than loyalties, evolved into civil war.

To go back to JW Mason:

why doesn’t decolonization figure in any of these discussions? If it counts as a change in national boundaries when Bangladesh ceases to be governed from Islamabad, why not when it ceases to be governed from London? Algerian independence wasn’t a change in national boundaries carried out by force?

I can see what you’re getting at to this extent: if one counts the creation of independent Bangladesh (1971) as a change in national boundaries carried out by force, then one could and probably should also count the creation of independent Algeria (1954-62) as a change in national boundaries carried out by force.

However, from the standpoint of the ‘territorial integrity norm’, there is an important difference — probably a couple of pertinent differences. Colonialism was rapidly losing its normative legitimacy after 1945 (a process that had begun earlier), so an anticolonial struggle like the Algerian war was seen by many primarily in that context — as an attack against an outmoded institution that was losing international legitimacy, not as an attack on a sovereign state’s territorial integrity. (France considered Algeria an integral part of France, so in France’s view it was an attack on its territorial integrity, but that’s not how it was viewed by much of the world.)

By contrast, the Bangladesh secession struggle, however justified it might have been as a response to an oppressive situation, was widely seen as a challenge to the principle of the territorial integrity of sovereign states. That’s why most Third World (postcolonial, whatever) countries did not support Bangladesh and India, and instead sided (in UN votes and/or other ways) with Islamabad.

While one can view armed anticolonial struggles like the Algerian war as violent changes of boundaries — which from one perspective they certainly were — one can also see them as struggles that ended up contributing to the strength of the principle (or norm) that national boundaries should be respected.

As Zacher notes:

The UN Charter of 1945…affirmed states’ obligation not to use force to
alter states’ boundaries. This same respect for the borders of juridical entities
influenced the UN’s approach to de-colonization. The colonial territory…became the frame of reference for making and responding to claims for self-determination and political independence. The 1960 UN Declaration on Granting Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples made clear that it was existing colonies, and not ethnic groups, that were eligible for independence. Concerning “dependent peoples,” it stated that “the integrity of their national territory shall be respected.” It then proclaimed that “any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity or territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” In 1970 the UN General Assembly approved a comparable normative statement in the Declaration of Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation Among States. There is clearly no ambiguity as to whether these major UN declarations supported respect for the territorial integrity of juridical states and existing colonies. [footnotes omitted]

This has been a great thread, and LFC’s contributions in particular have been excellent. I was sort of hoping for more on the cultural traditions angle but this was kind of enlightenting.

@js. and Ronan:
Thanks.
I’ll throw in one more title:
A. Diener and J. Hagen, eds., Borderlines and Borderlands: Political Oddities at the Edge of the Nation-State (the editors and contributors are geographers)

Also, hat tip to Ronan for telling me earlier about one of the recent books mentioned above @153.

I haven’t read Elden’s book either, but I looked at it briefly on Amazon ‘Look Inside’. There’s also no doubt some relevant stuff being written in French, which I can read, and German, which I can’t, just to mention two of the more obvs. If one was interested in ‘space’ as opposed to territory, I guess one would read Henri Lefebvre, but I think that’s probably a whole other kettle of fish. (I also deliberately left off the list anything published before ’99 or so, otherwise it would have gotten out of hand.)