Once British, always British

The basis of international society today is the territorial partitioning of the earth’s surface into states and the application or denial of sovereignty and some related attributes to the resulting territorial units, all of which are set within an international system of states. From the perspective of international political geography and international law any state needs a particular defined territory that is not shared with other states. Competing claims to territory are often the basis for conflict and continue to be the major reason for it. Furthermore, Territory is the critical quality for statehood, but for a state to exist, there must be a permanent resident population. The government speaks and acts, or claims to speak and act, on behalf of the total population of the state. People is another word often used to refer to a state’s population. This word has international legal meaning. The UN charter and numerous other legal instruments state that “all people” have the right to self determination. However, when the term is used in that sense, a question arises: does the use of the word people refer only to all of the people of a State, regardless of whether or not they all relate to and identify with the national identity and the national government? The people as a minority may have primary allegiance to a sub-state national identity or identities that separates them from the remainder of the existing state’s population. There is however, international legal recognition of certain minorities - as individuals and as collectives within states through such human rights instruments as the UN covenant of civil and political rights; the UN covenant of economic, social and cultural rights.

Nationality is dependent upon statehood for without statehood nationality would not exist it is generally accepted that the population of a state will, thus, have a sense of nation-hood but also that, as a nation, it will use its nationalism in the search for national stability and security. Nationality with respect to individuals refers to the quality of being a member or subject of a specific state. Each state is free to decide who its nationals will be and how nationality may be granted or rescinded. If nationality is withdrawn based on political grounds, then it will likely be condemned internationally; for such an act is considered of doubtful validity in international law. Of course, nationality can be returned by government or legal action. In contrast some states hold that nationality can never be “lost”, hence, for instance, we hear the saying “Once British, always British”.

The mention of a state’s permanent population or people raises questions pertaining to how group identities are defined and how they relate to the state. Group identities have religious, political, cultural, historical and psychological bases. For our purposes, it will be enough to refer to group territorial identities, a term that encompasses such other terms as tribe, ethnicity, ethno nationals, nation, nationalism, sub-state nationalism and so on, all of which are used in the literature. All these identifiers ultimately refer to a group’s distinct character, which sets it apart from others.

Refugees by definition, are homeless and are said to be stateless, they lack both national and international identity. This harsh reality and the hesitation of states to fully support the right to a nationality mean that most refugees will continue to lack nationality due to their forced removal from their respective home lands, their states of birth. In contrast to refugees who have been forced to leave their homes due to war, famine, natural catastrophes, and so on, there are individuals who may have left their states under duress but who are not seen to have given up their nationality. Political exiles, for example, may manage to win recognition, loyalty, and support for their causes among people and even governments in other states.

After all, territory is not , it becomes, for territory itself is passive, and it is human beliefs and actions that gave territory meaning. The bounds of territory can simply be delimited (I.e. agreed to perhaps by treaty, and thus generally written in some fashion), but they may also be demarcated. Territory is real in the sense that can be seen, felt, walked on, manipulated and thus altered. In this physical sense, it is quite concrete for it has substance, can be measured and can be changed and built upon. But territory is more than just a physical and measurable entity. It is also something of the mind because people inputs meaning to and meaning from territory, and some believe in the landscape of their territory as a living entity that is filled with meaning. Such beliefs are psychologically and culturally based and therefore exist, at one key level simply as parts of the geographies of the mind. But since people’s cultural ecology and spatial patterning as in agricultural and settlement systems can be powerfully influenced by their beliefs, it is in turn possible to read those beliefs from the landscape. They can be inferred from the creation of landmarks.

Territoriality for humans is a powerful strategy to control people and things by controlling area. It is necessarily a relational concept. It is about people controlling people. It is inextricably bound to power(control). It is strategic. Territoriality is defined as the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over a geographical area. Another way of putting this is to say that territories can figure in the mystification of power. In a modern context, the territory is a physical manifestation of the state’s authority, and yet allegiance to territory or homeland makes territory appear as the source of authority. The structure of territoriality can be analyzed with respect to 10 ingredients. The first three tendencies as parts of its definition consists of classification by area, communication, and enforcement. The definitional tendencies are always present. Other potential tendencies are classification by area, easier communication through the use of boundaries, efficient strategy for enforcing control, providing a means of reifying power, to displace attention from the relationship between the controller and controlled, making relationships impersonal, a place-clearing function, acting as a container or mould for events, socially emptiable space and segmenting of social space and finally: territory can help engender more territoriality.

Territory may also form the basis for conflict in a different sense, as when competing claims are made with respect to a particular territory. Such claims need not involve two states because competing claims can exist with in a state’s own territory. Consider the following definition of territory: Space to which identity is attached by a distinctive group who hold or covet that the territory and who desire to have full control over it for the group’s benefit.