ENTRY # 171
I. Introduction
Changes in the function of boundaries throughout history help to illuminate differences in the nature and patterns of interactions of different domestic and international systems. Such a clarification has become important for the analysis of international relations at a time when the world system appears to be characterised by two conflicting trends. On the one hand, we obsetve the virtually universal recognition of territorial sovereignty as the organising principle of international politics. On the other hand, because of the growth of transnational relations and interdependencies, there is a tendency toward erosion of the exclusivity associated with the traditional notion of territoriality. This disjunction between the organising principles and social reality creates dilemmas for conflict management. An investigation of these tensions and of the varying patterns in which they manifest themselves in different international systems is therefore of historical as well as analytical interest.
In this article, I intend to lay the groundwork for such an historical and comparative analysis of international systems. An examination of shifts in the functions of boundaries is particularly helpful for a better understanding of the origins and evolution of the present territorial state system. Without intending to bring back the old controversy of whether such changes can be taken as indicators of either the demise or the revival of the territorial state, I maintain that territoriality, like property, is not a simple concept, but comprises a variety of social arrangements that have to be examined in greater detail. For that purpose, I first investigate the function of boundaries in nonterritorial and territorial social organizations and give reasons for the transition from one form of organising societies to the other. Second, within the class of territorial orders, I distinguish between empires and territoriality in a state system. Finally, I will examine changes in the relationships and exchanges between international systems and their environment by contrasting the function of boundaries in territorially based orders with those based on functional regimes.
Section II deals with territorial and nonterritorial social organisations and the function of boundaries in each. Within the territorial category, those systems that are based on the mutual recognition of rights and acknowledged common practices are distinguished from “imperial” orders. The importance of these conceptual distinctions is shown by two brief case studies. The first examines Mongol society, which allows us to trace the changes in the function of boundaries when societies move from a nomadic (nonterritorial) to a sedentary (territorial) form of social organisation. The second case study is a comparative examination of imperial boundaries, exemplified by the relations of the Chinese, Roman, and British Empires with outsiders who were never accorded equal status. By contrasting the patterns of interaction in imperial orders and in the state system, we can show that the function of boundaries is significantly different.
In Section III, the conceptual distinctions developed thus far are used to discuss techniques of conflict management in the state system. Two strategies are examined in particular. One is the movement of the location of the boundary; the other concerns the manipulation of the function of boundaries through untying the bundle of rights conventionally associated with full territorial sovereignty. The first strategy or technique was characteristic of territorial adjustments during the classical balance-of-power period; the untying of sovereign rights throuBh imposed neutralisation, the creation of suzerainties, buffer states, spheres of influence or preponderance, and so forth, was used primarily by European powers in order to manage competition in the colonial world.
In Section IV, I investigate the creation of spheres of special responsibility in the contemporary system. I argue that the impossibility of reviving spheres of influence under modern conditions was one of the contributing causes of the Cold War, and that the failure to agree on the meaning of spheres of abstention led to the demise of détente. In addition, I discuss transborder resource arrangements and functional regimes and their implications for a theory of international relations.
Finally, in Section V, I draw some preliminary conclusions as to the power and parsimony needed in a systems approach to international relations.
II. Territoriality and the social formation of states
In contemporary social science, groups are often classified either as communities based on kinship or as communities built upon the recognition of mutual rights subject to a common law within a given territory. This distinction between tribal and territorial communities may be empirically and conceptually difficult to make, however. After all, even nomads do not wander aimlessly.
The primitive nomad who depends for survival on what he can find . must know the territory in which he roams: locales of water holes, where certain plants grow, the habits of game, etc...Thus, each nomadic band establishes rights over the territory within which it migrates although its members may visit bands of other territories.’
In such nomadic communities, the right to move prevails over the right to camp, and “ownership means in effect the title to a cycle of migration”. Lattimore studied the implications of these forms of allocating territorial use-rights among the Mongols.’ He followed the change of territorial use from common, tribally owned land administered by a prince to the establishment of fixed private ownership through the introduction of the monastic rule of Lamaism. The social consequences were startling. The original Mongol tribes were never static because disputes over the right of movement led to the splitting and coalescence of small clan-like groups. This allowed an exceptional leader like Genghis Khan to gather into his tribe those who, in search of protection, had fled from their abusive or ineffective overlords. Fundamental changes in the balance of power could be effected through such a gathering of followers by a leader.
The allocation of fixed property, on the other hand, prevented the process of agglomeration and led to the parcelling and repartitioning of tribal territory. The emphasis on fixed property first introduced by Lamaist monasteries led to further important internal as well as external changes The former tribal customs emphasized mobility and forbade the digging of wells and intensive agriculture in order to adjust the Mongol way of life to the steppe rather than to the marginal areas that could have sustained a mixed form of economy. Exclusive property titles, however, led to the ascendancy of wealth over mobility and drew the Mongols closer to China through trade. This development brought them under the influence of the Manchus, whose vassals virtually all of them became — especially when the Chinese intervened successfully in church affairs and divided northern from western Mongols.
Most Western travellers in the l9th century commented on the peaceful character of the once warlike Mongol people; Chinese official writings and Western observers attributed this development to the teachings of Lamaism. Matters were more complicated, however: some of the bloodiest wars between northern and western Mongols had been conveniently neglected in these accounts.‘ Lamaism had not only divided the Mongols and broken their ability to invade the Chinese Empire, but the settlements following the introduction of fixed property had also abolished the mobility that had been one of the strategic assets for raiding the border. The development of territoriality in the new sense made a more fixed relationship with China necessary. Unable to unite and maintain an independent basis of power, the Mongols became suzerains of the Manchu erriperors. Similar arrangements could be found all aiong the Chinese frontier; only the clash with Russia necessitated a more precise definition of the relationship between the suzerains and Russia. [...]
The treaty of Peking (1860) between Russia and Imperial China was an important step in this direction. It fixed the boundary as “following the mountains, great rivers and the present lines of Chinese permanent pickets”. This delimitation still left a substantial part of the Sinkiang (Xinjiang) region on the Chinese side, but the Imperial government did not decide to include Sinkiang formally in the Chinese Empire until 1884. Even after that date, it was still treated as an “outer regjon” inhabited by “barbarians” over which largely indirect control was exercised. According to Wheeler, Sinkiang remained substantially independent of governmental control by Peking until the 1940s.’ The governors appear to have determined all pertinent internal and external policies. Thus, although the Western state system imposed a particu- lar mode of territorial rule upon China's relationships with its clients and the rest of the world, the old social formation of China prevented the new international boundary from serving its function. Local leaders and Russian and Chinese clients made the attribution of the area to either state problematic in spite of its internationally settled boundaries. By the end of World War I, the region was ruled by various warlords who — as the case of Sheng Shih-tsai shows — were more sympathetic to the Soviets than to the National Chinese government under Chiang Kai-shek.9 The region was firmly in Chinese hands only after the Chinese Revolution. Still, the first treaties signed between the new China and Moscow protected Soviet interests in the area by setting up joint oil- and mineral-exploiting companies in Sinkiang; the Soviets had a majority vote.'° Stalin had used the same arrangement quite effectively in Eastern Europe in order to cement his political influence over Soviet client states. The arrangement with China continued until 1955.
The case of the Mongols has significant implications for our inquiry. If boundaries are important because of their role in mediating exchanges, a closer look at the tapes of relcitionships mediated by boundaries will prove instructive. At the most general level, boundaries are points of contact as well as of separation between a social system and an environment. As Luhmann remarks:
They reduce the points with the environment, thus allowing the internal conditioning of various relations with the environment. Only where boundaries do exist, relations between system and environment can increase their complexity, their differentiation and their controlled mut- ability. Boundaries are permeable to causality; they only make sure that each causal process involves the entire system.''
The natural boundary of a mountain crest or a watershed that separates societies is natural only because such areas are usually sparsely populated and bereft of natural resources. [...]
It is important though to distinguish between two types of exchanges: system-environment, and system-other systems.
As long as the contacts with the people on the other side were rare, it was possible to manage relations with a relatively low level of understanding. The others were “barbarians”, primitive, etc., which could be classified as part of the wild “environment” because not much carve of them ... Long- range contacts were essentially reserved to higher strata and traders and supplied the system with “strange” objects and were thus only strengthening the awareness of a deep difference between system and environment.’
When contacts increase and political and economic interdependencies are recognized, a differentiation arises between inter-system and system- environment relations. Exchanges between systems (states) are increasingly regulated by normative structures, even in cases of interstate violence. Thus, a “negative community” — one not united by a common purpose or a vision of the good life, but only by common practices and the mutual recognition of rights — comes into existence." Boundaries become lines (although their exact demarcation must wait until better means of geodesy develop) instead of remaining zonal frontiers. The importance of centre-periphery relations becomes visible and the task of boundary maintenance presents itself.
In the European context, we see these patterns in the development of the state system and in the emergence of the classical conception of boundaries that define exclusive zones of jurisdiction. The Treaty of the Pyrenees, which set up a joint commission for deciding where the exact boundary line between Spain and France would be drawn, inaugurated the first official boundary in the modern sense (1659)." Although similar attempts to determine boundar- ies were recorded earlier (e.g., Philip le Bel's attempt in 1312 to determine the boundaries of Flanders), the largely personalistic political organisation of the time made such attempts at delineation a different matter. Under feudal rule, loyalty was owed, depending on circumstances, to various overlords simultaneously. Thus, although the limits of the realm were quite well known, there was a tendency to obfuscate the boundaries of the kingdom. Nobles made war on their own and had pretensions on domains in other realms; interventions and counter-interventions were the order of the day, preventing the kingdoms from acting like unitary states."
In the case of the German Empire before the Thirty Years War, the lack of clear demarcation of a public realm for decision-making purposes was paral- leled by the confused status of the imperial powers with respect to “external affairs”. According to C. V. Wedgwood, a population of about “twenty-one million depended for its government on more than two thousand separate authorities”, and although free tenants and knights might form federations, there were still “over three hundred potentially conflicting authorities in Germany”
The different meanings of boundaries in such a political system thus become clear. The King of Bohemia, although a legitimate elector, was not entitled to participate in the meetings of the Electors' circle since his kingdom lay outside the confines of the Empire. The Elector of Brandenburg was a member of the Empire as a prince of Brandenburg — but, as ruler of Prussia since 1618, a vassal of the King of Poland. Similarly, the Duke of Lorraine, which was nominally within the Empire, also owed fealty to the King of France. Thus, even though the Hapsburg family had secured the imperial crown for generations through the control of votes within the Electors' circle, the Emperor's power was virtually non-existent except within his own possessions. The approval of the Electors' circle had to be sought for imperial initiatives such as the convening of the Diet and for any new tax, alliance, or declaration of war. The Rmperor was left without any right to independent action even in serious emergencies.
Fiscal and military organization was as little in imperial control as legislation. For these purposes the Empire had been divided into ten circles, each with its local Diet and elected president. Should a circle be attacked, the president couid appeal to the two neighboring circles to assist him, and if the three together were still unable to defend themselves, a further two might be called in. If this did not ease the situation, the five circles might then ask the Elector of Mainz to call the leading members of the Diet to Frankfort, a form of meeting without imperial consent which was called a Deputationstag. If this meeting agreed that the attacked district needed further help, they in turn appealed to the Emperor for a general Diet. By this amazing procedure it was possible for one-half of the Rmpire to be fully engaged in civil or external war before anyone was bound so much as to inform the Emperor."
Only exclusive sovereignty made defence and internal administration the primary and increasingly exclusive task of the central authorities. This development illustrates the complexity of the concept of sovereignty. It denotes internal hierarchy as well as external equality. The similarities and differences between boundaries in a state system and those developing in the frontier zones of empires are striking; they show the usefulness of separating centre- periphery relations from those of inter-system interactions and system- environment exchanges. Although the Great Wall of China and the Roman limes appear to be examples of linear boundaries, they are not boundaries in the modern sense. Owen Lattimore points out that
the concept of a man-made Great Wall ... was more a product of the kind of state created within China than of the kind of pressure against China from the steppe. Naturally enough, it is the military aspect of the Great Wall that has commanded most attention, and this has distorted its histoxical significance."
Considering the immense military strength of Ch'in at the end of the period of the warring states, the border changes of the Great Wall were not very extensive when compared to the territories of the former feudal king- doms that Ch'in had united, nor was there any imminent menace by northern barbarians. Most of the military threats came from the still unconquered south. The destruction of feudalism resulted from Ch’in’s deliberate policy of exterminating the nobility and of converting feudal serfs into peasants who owed rent to their overlord and taxes to the state. The nobles could no longer use serfs as soldiers and were only entitled to rent; the peasants could now be approached directly by the state for taxes and conscripted labour without the intercession of the feudal lord. With these changes, the defence of the boundaries became the task of the central authorities. Imperial boundaries did not operate to demarcate areas of exclusive jurisdiction on the basis of shared practices and mutual recognition of rights, but to keep the environment safe through the establishment of clients and the control of trade.
Similarly, the Roman Empire conceived the limes not as a boundary, but as a temporary stopping place where the potentially unlimited expansion of the Pax Romana had come to a halt. The political and administrative domain often extended beyond the wall" or stayed inside it at a considerable distance. Boundaries — i.e., legally relevant distinctions — existed only in private legal relations, there they governed property rights. The ager ptiblicus, or public domain, had no boundaries; it ended somewhere, but this end was not specifiable by means of a legally relevant line. (The expression used was fines esse.) The boundary was therefore essentially a Coating zone within which tributary tribes as well as Roman legions with local barbarian recruits were used to keep the peace. Other barbarian tribes were to be slowly acculturated and integrated, or subjugated and suppressed. Caesar's political plan, expressed in his Commentaries as well as in Plutarch, not only represents his personal political thinking but the policy consensus in Rome - at least until Commodes: to conquer the world up to the “earth-surrounding ocean.” After Commodus, these plans came to naught and Rome developed client relationships with the northern Germanic tribes until internal decay and the crushing defence burdens brought the imperial organisation to its knees.
A closer investigation of such client relationships as well as the similarities and differences in managing inter-societal affairs in the state system is now appropriate.
III. Boundaries and the management of the international system
The distinction between frontiers and boundaries, as well as the examination of how boundaries function under conditions of various social formations, is particularly helpful for understanding some issues of conflict management in international relations. Basically, two classes of techniques were available: management of the types of exchanges mediated by boundaries, and manipulation of the location of the boundaries. The latter was characteristic of the European balance-of-power system that attempted to “preserve the equilibrium in Europe” through territorial gains and divisions such as the division of Poland and the territorial adjustments at the Congress of Vienna." The former was employed most consistently around the edges of the various European empires that subjugated the colonial world. Institu- tions such as buffers, protectorates, spheres of interest (or influence), suze- rainties, and neutral zones were commonly used to impose European rule on more or less recalcitrant “locals” and to manage potential conflicts with other expanding European powers;" as in Europe, the institutions of servitude and imposed neutralisation (rather than division of territory) also played a role.
With the abolition of the colonial frontiers, many of the lines formerly marking off spheres of interest became permanent boundaries of successor states; some of the present boundary disputes result from such spheric agreements. The dispute between Ethiopia and Somalia, and the Indian-Chinese boundary problem concerning the meaning and understandings underlying the McMahon line in Tibet (dividing Tibet into two spheres but acknowledging the “suzerainty” of China), are cases in point. Nevertheless, some parallels or spheric boundaries, such as the 49th parallel in North America, are still in existence and serve as functioning boundaries at present.
Why have some meridians, designed primarily as markers indicating agreements in principle for uncharted territory, become boundaries without engendering conflict, and why have others not? One or more of the following conditions seem to have helped in mitigating potential disputes. First, most of the spheric boundaries still in existence are in deserts or polar regions The maintenance of such lines can be explained in terms of the costs of demarcation in an uncharted and hostile environment. Second, straight lines persisted when a colonial power gained possession of adjacent territory that was once marked off as lying in some other power’s sphere of influence. Former spheric demarcations therefore became internal administrative boundaries and only later, through state succession, international boundaries. The Egypt-Sudan, Tanganyika-Kenya, and Botswana-South West Africa borders are cases in point. The acceptance of the 49th parallel as the boundary between Canada and the United States has a different explanation. Jefferson advocated this line in 1818 on the basis of a putative agreement between the Hudson's Bay Company and French Canada. This proposal was acceptable to England precisely because the British had wanted that boundary since 1697, but it had never won the acceptance of the French.
Most of the time, however, former demarcation lines marking off the spheres of European power rivalry have been the cause of complicated arrangements. For instance, the treaty that established the Anglo-German sphere of influence in Africa in 1890 specifically provided for future adjust- ments in accordance with local requirements.2’ Consequently, the boundaries that emerged between Malawi and Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda, and Kenya and Tanzania show alterations (or are still in dispute).
The other method — the imposition of a special regime on a zone on the frontier — has given rise to patterns of interaction that are quite different from those between the sovereign territorial regimes of Europe. For example, in the 19th century the Balkans represented a “frontier zone” in which Austrian, Russian, and British influence met, and which could not be effectively dealt with by the nominal power, the Ottoman Empire. At that time, Turkey was not considered a European state; it only came to be regarded as a “civilised” nation, accepting the common practices and mutually recognised rights of the European state system, after the Crimean War. The Treaty of Adrianople (1829) gave the Tsar, as protector of the Christians, a right of intervention in certain Ottoman possessions, a circumstance that led to the Crimean War.
Later on, the Bosnian crisis of 1908 was the result of the incorporation of the nominally Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina into the Austrian Empire, although Austria had “administered” these provinces since 1878.
On the lowest level of formalisation is the “sphere of interest”, which is either backed by formal or informal agreements among competitor states alone (when “the locals do not matter”), or by additional arrangements with the local authorities. As to a sphere of influence, according to Lord Curzon, “no exterior power but one may reassert itself in the territory so described”.' Spheres of influence have therefore also been called “semi-suzerainties”. Other arrangements, such as the institution of a protectorate, or (full) suzerainty, or condominia, were also developed. The tripartite condominium between Germany, Britain, and the United States over Samoa, and the Anglo-French arrangements in Sudan and the New Hebrides, are examples of such joint administrations. The term “sphere of influence” appears to have entered the vocabulary of European diplomacy only in the late 19th century. It is somewhat ironic that this term originally was used by Russia to declare its disinterest in controlling Afghanistan. Count Gorchakov is reported to have assured Lord Clarendon in 1869 that “Afghanistan lay completely outside the sphere within which Russia might be called upon to exercise her influence”.
The application of this device to Africa during the Berlin Conference of 1884—1885 resulted in a relatively uncomplicated division of Africa among the colonial powers; they thus acquired vast territories without having to perfect their title through effective occupation and administration of the vast hinterlands to their colonial enclaves.’ Since these areas were technically term nullius (i.e., they belonged to nobody), considerable conflict could have developed from the inchoate titles in the absence of a multilateral agreement.”
A slightly different problem arose when the European powers faced a local state that, on one hand, could not effectively resist foreign penetration but, on the other, could not be wholly absorbed within one exclusive sphere of influ- ence. For such purposes, “spheres of preponderance” were designed; they nominally preserved the integrity of the country but allocated influence on an exclusive basis for certain areas or zones. An example of such an arrange- ment is the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 concerning Persia. Originally this idea had been floated by Salisbury precisely in order to preserve the integrity of Persia; the practical implication, however, was the division of a nominally independent state into exclusive spheres of influence. Keal describes Persian affairs after the 1907 convention:
Although both signatories had affirmed their intention to maintain the independence and integrity of Persia and to allow equal facilities for trade to all nations, that was not what happened in practice. The two powers sent a joint note to the Persian government, declaring that they would refuse to sanction loans from other powers if these loans involved granting concessions to any other power or their subjects contrary to Russian or British political and strategic interest. Persia protested, both about this and the Anglo-Russian Agreement, whereupon Petrograd and London reacted by warning other powers against taking up Persia's cause.”
Surveying the range of various frontier arrangements in 1945, Duncan Hall found the following rather surprising (but not exhaustive) set of mandates, international regimes, trusteeships, and so forth:
reading from south to north, ...: the mandates (now trusteeships) of Rwanda Burundi and Tanganyika; the Uganda Protectorate; rivalries and spheres of influence over Abyssinia; Eritrea, in turn Turkish, Egyptian, Italian, and now a projected international trusteeship; rivalries of Britain and France over Egypt and the valley of the file culminating in the Fashoda incident; the condominium of the Sudan; the former condominiums and protectorate over Egypt; the neutralized and demilitarized Suez Canal, with its international regime; the mandates over Transjordan, Palestine, and Syria; the projected international trusteeship regime for Jerusalem; the checkered history of Alexandretta, in turn Turkish territory, League mandate, international regime, and again Turlcish territory. As we shall see, the line of phenomena of the international frontier continues historically through Anatolia, along the Straits, through the Balkans, and thence on to the Baltic and even to the Arctic.”
Finally, there were neutral zones and buffer states, which allowed the local inhabitants considerable autonomy. Neutral zones stopped functioning when local refugees or even brigands used the lack of a strong internal or external authority for their own purposes. The neutral zone between the British and German territories of the Gold Coast and Togo had to be abolished in 1899 for that reason. All such areas without political authority were set aside in modern times when the exclusivity of territorial rule became more and more important. Thus, the neutral zone between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait was divided up equally between these states in 1965.
A good example of a buffer state is Afghanistan, which was created to separate British and Russian influence more effectively. Having failed in 1879 to impose a protectorate upon the resisting tribes, the British, with Russian consent, persuaded the Emir of Afghanistan to accept sovereignty over Vakhan, thereby creating the curious extension of Afghan territory toward China. To a large extent, the treaty of 1907 ended the rivalries of these European powers in that area. In a similar vein, Siam was successful in defending its autonomy against direct interventions by becoming a “neutral” in the British-French contest over Indochina.
As in Europe, neutralization was contingent upon the agreement of the Great Powers as well as upon the difficulty or costliness of extending the imperial boundaries.” This was the case when the territory in question was effectively administered by some sort of government that could prevent easy penetration. Otherwise, various client arrangements had to be developed in order to prevent the excluded states from invading, or — in cases where the border people were poorly organised — to prevent internal pressure from colonists, traders, military careerists, and others from involving the imperial state in further expansion at great cost. The social formation of the imperial state is therefore as important as that of the outer “barbarians” or tribes. We find historical examples for such imperial expansion due to the activities of traders and entrepreneurs in the machinations of Rhodes and Luederitz, Who extended British and German influence in Africa by forcing their governments to protect their private acquisitions. The debate concerning the causes of imperialism and the arguments that “empire does not pay” are familiar. The acquisition of Texas in the American frontier setting also shows the extension of influence originally brought about by private initiative.
The dynamics created by this clash of internal and external factors can be seen in Britain's policy in India. In the case of the British Northwest Frontier, London vacillated between a “closed-border” policy and a “forward” policy. The closed-border policy involved strict patrols of the border by the British, negotiations limited to representatives of transborder societies, and British insistence on the right of supervising and controlling transborder affairs. This policy was usually accompanied by an otherwise non-interventionist stance toward tribal affairs, and punctuated by occasional punitive expeditions when the security of British India was threatened. The forward policy, on the other hand, as exemplified by the Sandeman system of consultation and more active intervention in tribal affairs, offered arbitration and subsidies in order to keep the peace while not discouraging contacts between the subjects and the outsiders."
IV. Unspoken rules, networks, and regimes
After a survey of a variety of forms by which states have tried to modify the exclusionary nature of territorial sovereignty and thereby to manage their relations, the present world system appears to be considerably simpler. The emancipation of the colonial world not only abolished most of these arrangements — except when former spheres evolved into actual boundaries — but sovereign equality and the assertion of absolute territorial rights gained new salience. Especially in the third world, sovereignty has been invoked in order to modify domestic legal arrangements and inter- national obligations resulting from state succession. Thus, the affirmation of “Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources” which justifies nationalisation without the conventional compensation, is another way of reasserting independence; this often means that the domestic economy has to be isolated from foreign penetration through emphasis on “borders of separation.” Attempts to establish codes of conduct, for multinational corporations for instance, must thus be understood as a means to master the problem of loss of control that is concomitant to increasing interdependence. As Krasner has pointed out, the New International Economic Order is less a distributive bargaining for larger shares of wealth than a struggle for control. This struggle is primarily, or at least ostensibly, designed to ensure the sovereign independence of the developing countries within their own territorial confines; at the same time, it is an effort to control influences that originate beyond territorial borders and that have an impact on national life.
Nevertheless, a variety of contradictory tendencies can be found in present international life. The first is the universal recognition of territorial sovereignty as the differentiating principle in the international arena. But there is also a second, conflicting trend: the erosion of boundaries through the increasing interdependencies of modern economic life. Thus, while political systems are boundary-maintaining systems, markets — although dependent for their creation upon political power and economic networks — are not. It is precisely this difference that led to Wallenstein's argument concerning the success of European capitalism: the penetration of the entire world became possible only after the European powers had given up on the creation of a world empire and contented themselves with economic networks.”
This expansion, however, did not eliminate differentiation of centre and periphery, which sometimes made it necessary to extend direct political control into the penetrated areas. The establishment of colonial rule became necessary when the original informal agreements between the local rulers and their European counterparts broke down.“ Thus, far from proving the automatic and unproblematic nature of economic expansion, the history of European imperialism, especially in its rush into Africa, proves the importance of political underpinnings for the functioning of unbounded economic exchanges.
A third identifiable trait is the result of the power differentials among nations and the tensions between bounded political systems and unbounded exchanges such as economic, ideological, or informational transactions. The issues of dependency, propaganda, and transborder data flows come to mind. Thus, problems necessitating careful conflict management have not disappeared v/hile many of the old techniques of modifying the functions of boundaries for such purposes are no longer available. In short, although the system is based on sovereign territoriality, new conceptions modifying this exclusive regime have evolved that make the management of the international system possible without violating authoritative prescriptions.
Three types of new management devices have evolved: they are usually subsumed under the term “rules of the game”. These devices are: spheres of responsibility, spheres of abstention, and functional regimes. Of these, only functional regimes are clearly legal in character in that they usually rely, among other things, on treaties (bilateral or multilateral) and thereby create explicit rights and obligations. Spheres of responsibility mix legal rights with the unilateral arrogation of competence — which, if respected at all, gives rise only to a norm with the character of an “unspoken rule”. Spheres of abstention are the least formal arrangements. They are susceptible to breakdowns as demonstrated by the short-lived détente between the United States and the Soviet Union in the seventies.
Spheres of responsibility
Spheres of responsibility may be defined either functionally or territorially. The functional definition shaped the role of the Great Powers (a role that came into existence after the Congress of Vienna). It designated powers with system-wide interests — those that were to have a say in matters pertaining to the management of the system.
In the classic conception of politics, management questions primarily involved the issue of balances of power. But Metternich's attempts to stretch the meaning of security to include the internal constitution of the states (Congress of Verona), and England's reluctance to accede to such an under- standing of the Concert,“ showed that the purely functional system-wide specification of the responsibilities of a Great Power were problematic for two reasons:
(1) varying conceptions of legitimate sovereignty existed among the conservative and liberal participants, and
(2) the respective interests of various Great Powers showed significant geographic discontinuities.
Gradually, spheres of interest reemerged as the predominant concept, most clearly in the Balkans. As the clashes between Russia and Austria in this region demonstrated, conflict increasingly involved “internal” political groups (Pan-Slavism) or territorial division and incorporation (the Bosnian crisis of 1908). Incorporation became increasingly difficult as the system's flexibility decreased because of nationalism and a new understanding of politics as the “survival of the fittest”. A rational balancing in terms of territorial adjustments thus created scores that had to be settled. Territorial adjustments no longer could fulfill the task of restoring an acceptable status quo for all.
The notion of a special sphere of responsibility surfaced at the end of World War II, when the Allies discussed the structure of the postwar inter- national order. In this connection, it is worth mentioning Roosevelt's idea of the “four policemen” charged by the general international community with “enforcing the peace” in their respective areas, and Churchill's idea of a world organisation as a framework for regionnl arrcingements. The inability of the great powers to come to substantive understandings concerning either their collective responsibilities or their mutually accepted preponderance in certain regions demonstrates not only that thèse notions were imprecise, but also that they contained conflicting elements.
The Western conceptions of the future international order never resolved the tension between the principles of universalism and the regionalist bias exhibited by Churchill and even sometimes by Roosevelt. The U.N. was based, from the beginning, on an uneasy compromise between the claim of universal competence to deal with all matters of peace and security (even with respect to non-members) — as the Security Council was entrusted with the enforcement of peace — and the claim to collective self-defence that spawned regional alliances.” In addition, the two main antagonists, the Soviet Union and the United States, did not have a common understanding of the legitimacy and liinits of Great-Power in8uence in their respective sphères. For this reason, informal agreements — such as Churchill's proposal on apportioning influence in the Balkans on the basis of either exclusive or shared zones of prepondernnce — were doomed to fail. The U.S. refused to recognise such deals, but even if they had been accepted, the Soviet conception of interest was so extensive that it came to mean the virtual exclusion of all foreign influence, or even constitutional limitations. Instead of exerting power through alliances and informal means, Stalin's mistrust of his client governments — especially when they showed interest in Western economic recovery plans — led to an absolute Gleichschaltung of the Soviet satellites."
In this way, we can establish the similarities and differences between the management devices of the 19th century and of modem times. First, there appears to be a similarity in the change from the more universal conception of a functionally defined general responsibility for peace and security to a more solidly defined territorial sphère of influence. What is surprising is the rapidité with which this change occurred in the postwar era. Various forms of the European Concert had functioned (admittedly with different degrees of success) for several generations,’2 but the drastic shift in the postwar era took only a few years. This remarkably quick change, which was accompanied not by mutual accommodation but instead led to the exacerbation of cold-war tensions, was caused by the lack of commonly accepted practices that could guide and set limits to the exertion of influence.
A second comparison between the developments in the 19th century and those of the 20th shows an inverse historîcal sequence. Metternich's extensive interpretation of Austria's security interest failed to win acceptance and then quickly led to a more moderate interpretation of domestic challenges to the international order; Soviet insistence on an implausibly extensive security interest initially led to hostility and the breakdown of interactions, but ultimately to a de facto accommodation. A measure of ideological preponderance was added to the classical notion of a sphère of influence: regimes based on ideologies that do not agree with that of the regional great power can be changed or suppressed. The similarities between the U.S. assertion of primacy in the Western hemîsphere (including American interference with non-conformist regimes) and Soviet behaviour in the Eastern bloc have been noted. Moreover, both powers have developed extensive rationales or doctrines for their purposes, as Franck and Weisband have pointed out.
Differences also exist. The accommodation that occurred in the late sixties and early seventies was not backed by explicit agreements, and the rules of the game that have emerged in regard to sphères of influence resemble “unspoken” rules. This last point constitutes a significant dissimilarity between the European state system and the modem international System.
In the old conception, a sphère of influence or interest was usually the result of bilateral, explicit agreements. This had two consequences:
(1) the agreements created enforceable rights among the contracting parties; and
(2) they imposed a regime upon the local inhabitants.
Because agreements in international law cannot bind non-participating third parties (pacta tertiis nec prosunt nec nocent), the non-recognition of the local powers as full subjects of international law was formerly a precondition for such legal arrangements. With the acceptance of territorial sovereignty as the universal organising principle in present international relations, the legal expression of such agreements is not possible. Consequently, such understandings can have only the status of tacit or unspolcen rules, as Keal has called them.”
Such rules generally emerge through unilateral calculations (which take verbal as well as non-verbal eues into account); their root lies in the coincidence of the perception of a common interest. Unilateral calculation occurs on the basis of expectations about the other's reaction to the self's action:
A's expectation of B will include an estimation of B's expectations of A. This process of replication, it must be noted, is not an interaction between two states, but rather a process in which decision-makers in one state work out the consequences of their beliefs about the world; a world they believe to include decision-makers in other states, also working out the consequences of their beliefs. The expectations which are so formed are the expectations of one state, but they refer to other states."
Although expectations that prove correct in a number of instances attain a certain stability and provide some guidance for future decision making in similar situations, compliance with these unspoken rules will be unproblematic only when the perception of a common interest is sufficiently strong. Obviously, this will be the case in instances in which the situation resembles a game of coordination i.e., when the interests of the interacting parties are neither opposed nor mixed.” To that extent, Hume's example of two men coming to a “tacit” agreement about how to row a boat is instructive, as a common interest can be assumed. If states perceive the situation as resembling a Prisoners' Dilemma, however — i.e., when mixed motives are given and the incentives to defect are larger than those to cooperate - rules and norms that attempt to shore up the cooperative solution will be endangered. This problem is further aggravated by the imprecision of the tacit rule. Since it is not based on explicit verbal agreements and thus secured by the meanings of ordinary language,” but only on unilateral imputations of motives for actions and other non-verbal acts, its institutionalisation is weak; no explicit discourse about the tacit rule is possible, and therefore neither scope nor applicability to certain contexts can be discussed.
Spheres of abstention
In the foregoing considerations I referred to spheres of abstention, which were either tacitly agreed upon by the superpowers or created by the United Nations through “preventive diplomacy”. Such arrangements broke down in the Congo when the interjection of U.N. troops was identified with the policy goals of a particular faction that possessed outside sympathies. As soon as the question arose for what purposes the U.N. troops were being used — aside from reestablishing minimal control of the situation — the idea of preventive diplomacy failed. The opposition of the Soviet Union and its refusal (together with France) to pay for the operation led to a financial crisis of the world organisation which clearly and narrowly circumscribed future activities of this kind.
The tacit understanding among the superpowers to leave most of the developing world to its own devices came to naught during the Ford adminis- tration and contributed significantly to the demise of détente. The arrange- ment was susceptible to subversion because of the perception of relatively large gains for limited involvements, particularly in the weak states of Africa. In addition, intervention by proxy (Cuba) appeared to enable the intervening party to disclaim responsibility.
Finally, détente itself was problematic. It was based on the recognition of the Soviet Union as an equal world power, but the United States increasingly tried to de-link the Soviet-American understandings concerning nuclear parity and arms control from the siibstantive consensus concerning certain regions. For example, attempts by the Soviet Union to propose a joint under- taking in the Middle East and thereby to transform détente into an entente were rebuffed by the United States through the drastic measure of a nuclear alert." "Linkage” was advocated by the U.S. and opposed by the U.S.S.R. in certain areas (détente and economic help), but it was invoked by the Kremlin and negated by the White House in others (condominia).
Negative understandings are weak — aside from the extreme case of mutual assured destruction or, as Hobbes would have called it, the “fear of violent death”. They are subject to defeating considerations precisely because an agreement of abstention is often too ambiguous about the limits of allowable influence. Furthermore, the perception of mutual interest is not shored up by "rights” that demonstrate to the participants the tangible guif pro quo in cases of conflict and insulate an issue from the overall patterns of social interaction.‘ A "right” implies that one is no longer dependent upon the opponent's approval and goodwill in all circumstances.
Functional regimes
The third important device for managing international relations in the mod- ern state system is that of functional regimes. Basically, functional regimes "unbundle” the package of rights inherent in territorial sovereignty. Functionalism has therefore sometimes been advocated as an alternative organisational principle for international life. Functional regimes, it was hoped, would not only downgrade the importance of national boundaries, but could, through the expansion of transboundary cooperative networks, lead to "peace in parts.” In addition, some recent developments seem to indicate that the traditional package of territorial rights is being modified. Several new arrangements have emerged from the Law of the Sea draft treaty (UNCLOS III) by which competing resource uses can be accommodated without the all- or-nothing regulation of territoriality. Only in this fashion could the compet- ing interests in security, resource management, access (navigational rights), pullution abatement, and freedom of research of the new "whole” called "oceans”" be guaranteed. The creation of an Exclusive Economic Zone, the new definition of the continental shelf, of international straits, of archipelagic regimes, and of provisos for resource recovery from the deep sea through the International Seabed Authority all show such features." Similarly, a variety of specific resource regimes within the framework created by the Antarctic Treaty has carefully avoided the territorial issues between those countries claiming certain sectors and those not claiming any territory, and between states whose claims overlap (e.g., Argentina, Chile, and the United Kingdom).“ One of the most remarkable successes of the Antarctic regime is its demilitarisation and denuclearisation backed by a unique inspection system.
Functional regimes also need continuous updating and upgrading, depending upon the emergence of new issue areas and the realisation of interaction effects of various regimes. The discovery of mineral resources in Antarctica, for example, made negotiations for such a regime a matter of urgency. Furthermore, the effect that mining will have on the other regimes (particularly the living resources and the Antarctica fauna and flora regimes) will make stringent environmental regulation necessary. Such a proliferation of regulations not only necessitates continuous negotiations and cooperation, but also the institutionalisation of procedures to settle disputes in order to manage the inevitable conflicts. The advantage of the all-or-nothing principle of territorial sovereignty in this respect is not merely its simplicity, but the implicit presumption that, in the face of newly emerging problems, the territorial unit — and only the territorial unit — has the right to regulate matters, Thus, although clear boundaries create problems by excluding others, they also simplify international life. In the political arena, they appear at present to be the precondition for the existence of national independence, constitutional rule, and responsible government by creating and reinforcing significant breaks within the stream of transactions of world society.
V. Conclusion
I have addressed the problem of the function of boundaries in territorial and non-territorial social orders for historical as well as for theoretical reasons. The historical interest is rooted in the need 'for a better understanding of those changes that led to the emergence of the European state system in the 17th century, after the demise of the medieval empire. The theoretical interest concerns the appraisal of the present world system. This system is characterised by conflicting trends in the universal recognition of territoriality as the organising principle in international politics and by the observable countertrend of increasing interdependencies that undermine exclusivity.
In the present approach, I investigated three types of exchanges that determine the function of boundaries, by systematically examining the exchanges that take place between a unit and its environment, the exchanges among units, and the exchanges between a unit's centre and its periphery - as well as their various interaction effects — I developed a parsimonious explanation of systems characteristics in a wide variety of territorial and non-territorial social systems. The heuristic power of this approach was further evidenced by its ability to relate the characteristics of systems to modes of conflict man agement by means of boundaries. Two techniques were discussed: the movement of the location of a boundary, and the changing function of boundaries brought about by allowing or excluding certain types of exchanges. The first strategy was characteristic of the European balance of power and its territorial adjustments. The second was used predominantly in the colonial world, where spheres of influence or preponderance, as well as buffer states, became the standard devices for managing conflict with other European powers.
Beyond these historical examples, I discussed modern attempts of creating functional regimes and formulating tacit rules in order to manage conflicting uses of resources and political interests. I also examined the robustness, or rather the reasons for the limitations and the lack of effectiveness, of these techniques.
Some difficulty is created by attempts to place this approach in the wider context of theoretical efforts in international relations. However, it is apparent that this inquiry is more indebted to a system-of-action perspective" than to structural theories of international relations“ that emphasise the unintended consequences of the actors' choices. Although structural theories explain an important aspect of interactions in an anarchical environment, they fail to suggest further avenues for research beyond the original market analogy and utility-maximising actions under constraints. It is here that the advantages of a more historically oriented approach become apparent. By focusing on the changing function of boundaries rather than on the configuration and number of actors or the “rationality” of their actions, the present approach provides for a richer and more detailed treatment of the historical material while preserving parsimony and explanatory power.
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Friedrich Kratochwil (2011). The
Puzzles of Politics. Inquiries Into the Genesis and Transformation of
International Relations. London, New York: Routledge, pp. 219-237
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