1.2 Territorial Conflict Approach
1.2.6 The Insights of Territorial Conflict
Up to this point we have critically discussed the theory and methodology of the territorial conflict approach, and have argued that there exist serious flaws in both. Yet despite all this criticism, it cannot be denied that the approach does what it sets out to do: the methodological focus on conflict, while inappropriate for the majority of contemporary territorial disputes, is based upon the empirical observation that interstate conflict is more likely where two states share a territorial dispute. This final section assesses some of the main insights generated by the approach. Insights refers to the ‘issues’ which scholars have identified and found to have a statistically strong correlation with conflict in territorial disputes – specifically contiguity/proximity, regime type, reputation, and finally the duration of the dispute.
The relationship between proximity and levels of conflict may seem self-evident, but demonstrating that there was a stronger relationship between territory and conflict than contiguity and conflict was one of the original tasks of scholars using the territorial conflict approach. The basis of the contiguity argument was that proximity and interactions “provide the opportunity and willingness to engage in conflict” (Starr and Thomas, 2005: 136; Starr, 1978). In other words, a territorial dispute was just one of many issues which could occur between close neighbours – it was the fact that they were close neighbours – i.e. contiguous – which was significant. While, unsurprisingly, a statistical relationship can be found between whose status is disputed by the UK, Denmark, Ireland, and Iceland (though Iceland does not claim the territory, rather it merely disputes the legal status of the rocks).
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contiguity and conflict, Ben-Yahuda points out that while “proximity may produce an opportunity for neighbouring states to fight ... it does not explain changes in motivation to do so” (2004: 87). The contiguity school was subsumed into the territorial conflict school through statistical findings such as: “given contiguity, war initiation depends heavily on the presence or absence of a never-resolved territorial dispute” (Kocs, 1995: 172). Moreover, the clear relationship between territorial disputes – rather than contiguity/proximity – and conflict has been cemented by Senese’s finding that of the territorial dispute dyads, the most war-prone ones were non-contiguous (2005).
As noted earlier, the establishment of the empirical relationship between territorial disputes and conflict clarifies what many scholars already assumed was the case: some degree of conflict is indeed inherent in the term ‘dispute’. As with Mitchell and Hensel’s (2011) finding that “interstate wars are 13 times more likely over territories with intangible salience characteristics [symbolic value]”, it is difficult to say what we actually learn from the observation that conflict is more likely where two states share a dispute. What does this mean for all the disputes which have seen not seen any actual conflict beyond the exchange of diplomatic barbs? What does this empirical relationship mean for the use of force in contemporary territorial disputes? For the reasons outlined above (neglect of the role of norms, laws, and so on) this insight does not provide adequate answers to these vital questions.
The democratic peace has been described as “the closest thing we have to an empirical law in the study of international relations” (Levy, 1989: 88) – and much like the territorial conflict approach, the democratic peace school is based upon large-scale dyadic studies of international conflict. Furthermore, as explained earlier, the territorial conflict
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approach was born as a reaction to realism – bearing these two points in mind it should be no surprise that many studies examine the relationship between territorial disputes, regime type and conflict (see for example Huth, 1996; Hensel, 2001; Huth and Allee, 2002). While some empirical regularities have been found, a theory underpinning these findings has not clearly emerged.
In keeping with the democratic peace research, Huth (1996, 2000) found that authoritarian states are more likely to seek to both initiate and escalate territorial disputes than democratic ones. This is not to say, however, that democratic states have been found to be more eager to seek peaceful settlement; rather, further studies have shown that they are no less likely to offer concessions than non-democracies (Huth and Allee, 2002). Huth (2000) finds an explanation for this in the secure domestic political environment which autocracies enjoy (free as they are from the vagaries of electoral politics) – while simultaneously acknowledging that domestic political opposition in a democracy is more likely to advocate a more hawkish line than the government.23 In terms of theory, Gibler (2007) attempts to turn the whole democratic peace on its head by explaining it in territoriality terms when he claims that “what scholars know as the democratic peace is, in fact, a stable border peace” (2007:
529). What he means by this is that states stabilise their borders before they become democratic, thus democracy and peace are symptoms, rather than causes, of the removal of territorial issues between neighbours. This explanation is far less than convincing – many democratic states have democraticised, and remained democratic, in spite of glaring, sometimes existential, territorial disputes.24
23 We can see this, for example, in the Japanese Communist Party’s maintenance of a claim not only over the entire Kurile Island Chain but also over Sakhalin.
24 Examples of this include France, the US, and Israel.
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Still, regime type surely does play a role in territorial disputes, but there is far more to the domestic political sphere in territorial disputes than the territorial conflict literature appears to appreciate. Huth’s point that domestic political opposition in a democracy is more likely to advocate a hawkish line hints at the complex nature of territorial disputes and their usage by various domestic factions. Yet, while Huth singles out democracies, various studies have shown that territorial disputes are also used by different forces in authoritarian states within and outside the government (see Deans, 2000; Williams, 2006; Downs and Saunders, 1998; this chapter, Section 1.4.1). The ways in which territorial disputes are used and abused by domestic groups, both government and opposition, in both democracies and authoritarian states, are simply too intricate and context-dependent to be appreciated by the procrustean quantitative approach of the territorial approach.
The logic of the relationship between reputation and territory is laid out by Barbara Walter (2003: 149) in her study of the intractability of territorial conflict. She states that government actions in internal territorial disputes (against secessionist states) are based on expectations of the future – that is to say “governments actively choose to fight an early challenger in order to deter others from making similar demands” (2003: 138), and concludes that “the logic of the argument should apply equally well to territorial conflict between states”
– she specifically cites China “with its many contiguous states” as an example (2003: 149).
Indeed, Japan, with its three disputes, would also be a prime candidate. However, Fravel (2008) has made a comprehensive study of China’s many post-1945 territorial disputes and his findings contradict this hypothesis – despite being an authoritarian state with an often favourable balance of capabilities, China compromised on its borders over and over again, especially in the 1960s and 1990s (Fravel, 2000; also see Huth, 1996: 122; outlined later in this chapter).
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Given the discussion of the utility of a purely rationalist hypothetico-deductive approach earlier, this contradiction should not be surprising. Walter’s quantification of symbolic value leaves much to be desired – “the length of time a given ethnopolitical group had resided on a piece of territory” (2003: 144) – and, unsurprisingly given this crude quantification, she finds symbolic value statistically insignificant. Yet Fravel’s case studies show that China compromised in many of its border disputes, but never in what he terms homeland disputes (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao). This dissertation utilises ideas of reputation and the symbolic value of territory, albeit not as the primary focus of the research but as tools to flesh out the background and motivations for the sovereignty game analysis.
As Fravel’s findings show, reputation is a tricky and context-dependent concept, and cannot be used in a one-size-fits-all universal approach to territorial disputes. For this reason, in this research the context of the dispute itself will determine whether and to what extent these concepts are useful.
Many studies have shown a correlation between the duration of a dispute and increasing levels of conflict (Senese and Vasquez, 2003; Chiozza and Choi, 2003), although explanations of this tendency have been less than satisfactory. Huth (1996: 128-133) found that a history of militarised disputes coupled with a stalemate in negotiations dramatically increased the likelihood of conflict. Similarly, Senese and Vasquez find that “as disputes recur, they have a greater probability of going to war” (2003: 279). The explanation provided is as follows: the territorial dispute may not escalate at first, but “the conflict will fester, and ... eventually a crisis between states disputing territory will come along that escalates to war” (2003: 278). On the other hand, Chiozza and Choi show that “it is clear that the most common strategy for all leaders involved in territorial disputes is to stick to one’s demands
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while avoiding the use of military force” (2003: 269) while Kocs found that “even the most durable and intractable territorial conflicts tend to be resolved eventually” (1995: 168).
Further, much dispute resolution literature suggests that the more time passes, the easier disputes are to resolve (for example Gartner and Segura, 1998).
Clearly, no consensus joins these analysts together. Looking at Japan’s disputes, we see that Japan has been at war twice with both China and Russia in the modern era, and formally occupied the Korean peninsula for thirty-five years, so there clearly is a long and bloody history of militarised conflict. Moreover, there has been no substantive progress in negotiations in any of the disputes at any time in their history – rather, drawing on Huth’s terminology above, in each dispute there have been regular stalemates. Yet, contrary to what both Huth and Senese and Vasquez predict, there not only has never been war over the islands/rocks at the heart of the three disputes, but there has not even been any military conflict. On the other hand, the disputes range between forty and sixty years old, with little progress towards resolution in that time.25 Are Japan’s territorial disputes outliers, empirical abnormalities which defy explanation – part of Japan’s fabled uniqueness, perhaps? This dissertation refuses to traverse this well-worn path; it argues rather that the hypothetico- deductive approach cannot appreciate the context-dependent nature of the effect of time on territorial disputes.
Hassner uses diachronic process-tracing case studies to provide a far more credible constructivist account of the entrenchment of territorial disputes, adopting a line of argument that this author shares, namely, that “changes in perceptions of territory over time are not
25 The Northern Territories dispute can be exempted from this, as been the subject of rather complicated negotiations and whose resolution was prevented by larger, geopolitical factors, see Chapter Five).
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amenable to quantitative analysis” (2007: 111). Rather, using the concept of entrenchment (“the process by which disputes become increasingly resistant to resolution” [2007: 109]), he describes the material (perceived cohesion), functional (clear definition of boundaries) and symbolic (the irreplaceability of the territory) processes through which “the territory is invested with nationalist, religious, ethnic or other emotional value” (2007: 113). While these symbolic processes are often instigated by elites, their dynamic can take them beyond the direct control of such elites, and in certain cases may have negative, unintended consequences, ensnaring elites into non-negotiable positions (an argument also made by Goddard, 2006). He sees resolutions of entrenched disputes as coming about either from systemic shock, which can be external or internal, or from individual, influential leaders who succeed in “reconfiguring perceptions of the disputed territory among their constituencies”
(2007: 137). This dissertation builds on and deploys the symbolic aspect of Hassner’s theory in its attempts to deal with the symbolic value of territory (see Chapter Two, Section 2.8.4).