Governing takes place in identifiable jurisdictions with natural (water, mountain range) and/or artificial (negotiated) boundaries. As we stated at the outset of this chapter, today almost all of the earth’s landmasses are
“administered space;” that is, belong to a specific country. The only land- mass that does not is Antarctica, which is governed through the 1959
Antarctic Treaty, which by now has 42 signatories (Jorgensen-Dahl and Ostreng, 1991). How were and are these boundaries set?
Before the modern period, boundary setting was mainly a nonlinear process whereby borders were established through conquest, settlement, inheritance, sale/purchase, and secession (this paragraph based on Buchanan and Moore, 2003, pp. 317–335). In the case of conquest, an aggressor simply invaded an adjacent territory for its resources and thus enlarged his own state and revenue. Historically, conquest has been the most dominant mode of boundary setting. Settlement was a situation where one state occupied waste or vacant land and colonized it. Indeed, settlement was the main method through which a few European countries managed to acquire large territories in other continents either by settling their own populations (as in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand) or by govern- ing territories elsewhere in the desire to civilize them (as in the case of colonization of Africa and parts of Asia). With regard to land, sale/purchase and inheritance are much less common since a country’s territory as a whole is not private property. Finally, secession may be the outcome of a particular group’s effort to change existing boundaries, and this has become more common in our own time. Secession may take the form of complete separation from an original sovereignty, such as the desire of some Québec- ois pursuing independence from Canada, of some of the Basque people who wish to separate from Spain, and of Scottish separatists who wish to leave the Union with England that was established in 1707. A less disruptive form of secession is the acquisition of some degree of autonomy within a jurisdiction, as is the case with, for instance, many of the British Commonwealth countries (that are independent but recognize the British monarch as the head of state) and with Aruba within the Dutch Antilles.
There are two important moments in the development of the contem- porary practice of international boundary setting. Thefirst is the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 that laid the foundation of the modern state system; the second moment is really a period, 1900–1945, when the basic stages of modern boundary setting were defined.
The Peace of Westphalia ended the Eighty Years War between Spain and the Dutch Republic and the Thirty Years War in Europe. Relevant to understanding government today is that at the negotiations in the German city of Münster the principle of nonintervention was defined. Initially this concerned the ruler’s right to determine the religion of her/his territory, but in the mid-eighteenth century this was extended to prescribe that rulers could not interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries (Krasner, 2001;
Sørenson, 2004, pp. 103–121). Indeed, governments generally do not
intervene in each other’s policies, and can do so only when a state’s sovereignty is violated by another state (for instance, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991) or when a state commits serious crimes against humanity (for instance, genocide in Kosovo in 1995).
Since the late nineteenth/early twentieth century international bound- ary setting has been organized as a stage-wise, linear process. Thefirst step is that ofdelimitation.This is the legal process through which sovereign states determine and describe where their common boundary is located. It usually is the outcome of a process at the negotiation table. The second step is demarcation, which involves marking the position of boundaries on the ground. Thefinal step isdelineation,which is a comprehensive description of all the demarcation and mapping activities that document the boundary for future reference (see Al Sayel and others, 2009; Al Sayel, 2010, pp. 7–8).
In the history of humankind it has only been during the past 50 years that the globe was mapped in its entirety. There is no unincorporated land left (save Antarctica). From the moment that sedentary communities emerged, which is now some 10,000 years ago, all world-systems, to use the concept of Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall, underwent sequences of expan- sion and contraction, of centralization and decentralization. What started with a few pockets of sedentary habitation slowly but surely pulsated tofinally encompass all land (Chase-Dunn and Hall, 1997, pp. 204–206). The long trend has been one of increasing polity size, and thus decreasing the number of autonomous polities. Rein Taagepera analyzed this trend with respect to the rise and fall of the world’s empires (1978a, 1978b, 1979). Thefirst phase from 2850 BCE to 700 BCE was prompted by beginning urbanization.
The second phase until about 1600 CE was characterized by increasing capabilities to delegate power to territorially layered bureaucracies entrusted to help govern the territory on behalf of the ruler. The third phase came about as a consequence of the commercial-industrial revolution in Europe (1978a, pp. 121–123).
As the earth’s lands were slowly but surely incorporated and the distinction between core (central city-state) and periphery (hinterland) disappeared, the territory within a polity was also more clearly delineated through hierarchically structured jurisdictions.
Taagepera’s schema (see Figures 3.1 and 3.2) is appealing in its simplicity, but keep in mind that the historical record is far more complex, especially with regard to his second phase. Some empires were fairly successful in subjugating peripheral regions, such as the Chinese empire from the Han dynasty on. Other empires were much more loosely bound, and an example of that would be the Holy Roman Empire between the tenth and the early
nineteenth centuries CE. Notwithstanding the differences, though, govern- ments in both states and empires were slowly but surely increasing their hold on the territory through bureaucratization.