Nations, States, and the Independence of South Sudan

Celebrations marked the birth of South Sudan in Juba, the new country's capital.

South Sudan became an independent state today, six months after its people voted in a referendum to break away from Sudan and form their own country. You can watch videos of the festivities here.  The north and the south have fought two civil wars in Sudan, with the latest (ended by a peace agreement in 2005) claiming over two million lives. The international recognition of South Sudan will confer upon its government juridical (legal) sovereignty–the recognized right to rule within a defined territory without external interference. But empirical (actual) sovereignty is something different–the government’s ability to control its territory and maintain independence from outside interference.  Often a government possesses juridical but not empirical sovereignty (consider Pakistan’s inability to control its tribal areas) or empirical sovereignty without international recognition (Taiwan).  It appears that South Sudan may have a shot at both types of sovereignty, although there remain internal ethnic divides and unresolved disputes with Sudan over the south’s oil resources and territorial boundaries in the regions of Abyei and South Kordofan that could tempt the north to intervene and undermine South Sudan’s sovereignty.

With the independence of South Sudan from the Republic of Sudan, both countries become closer to meeting the ideal of a “nation-state” than they were before.  The north is predominantly Arab and Muslim, whereas the south is black, Christian, and Animist.  Reflecting the sentiment of many in South Sudan, a man celebrating the country’s birth carried a hand-painted sign that read “From today our identity is southern and African, not Arabic and Muslim.” Political scientists use the term nation to describe a group of people who have a common identity.  Usually this group shares a history and such characteristics as culture, religion, and language, but the common identity–a sense of “we-ness”–is the most important attribute.  In contrast, the term state refers to a political entity (a government) that controls a defined territory and population.  Many states are actually multinational (Sudan before the south broke away would definitely qualify), and frequently nations are split between several states.  This is particularly common in Africa, where imperial powers created boundaries based on their colonial interests rather than the realities of where ethnic and tribal groups lived.  Nation-states only exist where the nation and the state coincide (examples would include Japan and Egypt), and these are the exception rather than the rule worldwide.  Of course, a mismatch between political boundaries and ethnic or cultural boundaries is a frequent cause of conflict.  In the case of Sudan, the Arab and Muslim north’s political and economic domination of the south reinforced the these identity boundaries and helped to produce today’s new political and territorial boundaries. Financial Times blogger Gideon Rachman suggests that this redrawing of boundaries could even be the wave of the future:

“A peaceful partition would also obviously have implications for the rest of Africa. It is a commonplace that many of the borders inherited from the colonial era make little sense. But there is understandable anxiety about the potential for conflict, if African borders start being withdrawn. If the division of Sudan demonstrates that this can be more or less peacefully, it may not be that long before the world has 200 states.”

The Politics of (Disappearing) Statehood

Local Fishers in Kiribati

There’s an interesting debate brewing at the intersection of global climate change and international law. Historically, the idea of national sovereignty was based on the territorial integrity of the nation-state [glossary]. That is, the idea of statehood was defined, in part, by the physical territory in which the state exists.

But what happens if that territory disappears? This question is being asked by several small, low-lying island states fearing that their territory may become uninhabitable—or indeed disappear altogether—as ocean levels rise as a result of global climate change.

The law in this area is unclear. While the breakup of countries like Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union provides precedent for the breakup of existing countries, there is no precedent for the physical disappearance of a country. The government of the Marshall Islands is asking precisely this question.

And even if the country doesn’t disappear, it may become uninhabitable. Already, countries like Tuvalu and Kiribati are suffering from increasing salinization of groundwater supplies, as ocean water seeps into wells. If the islands become uninhabitable, what would happen to the citizens of those countries? Would they become a stateless population? Would they continue to have citizenship in a country that no longer exists?

And what about the economic rights of statehood. Under current international law, states possess extensive rights over territorial waters, which can be rich fishing grounds and home to other valuable resources. What happens if the islands from which the territorial waters are measured disappears?

There are many interesting questions but few real answers.

Statehood for South Ossetia?

If you’ve never heard of South Ossetia before this week, you’re probably not alone.  The region was an Autonomous Oblast (think county, but with a bit more independence) within the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic until 1990, when the Soviet Union broke up.  Georgia claimed ownership of South Ossetia, but the region declared its independence from Georgia in the early 1990s.  Since then, it’s had its own separatist government which hoped to negotiate independence from Georgia.  Despite two popular referenda which approved independence, the government of Georgia refused to grant independence, and no other country has recognized South Ossetia’s claim.

Why all this fuss over independence, autonomy, recognition, and statehood?  The state has long been the central unit of analysis (and has frequently been viewed as the most important actor) in political science.  The Nation-State—where the boundaries of a physical territory and government correspond to the boundaries of a group of people with a common national identity—has traditionally been the ideal-form of state.  But nation-states have also been exceedingly rare, as the boundaries of nations and states rarely correspond.  In the modern world, perhaps only a few states are truly nation-states: Japan, Portugal, and Iceland. 

Far more often, the boundaries of nation and state do not correspond.  Thus we get stateless nations (the Kurds, the Palestinians) and multinational states (Belgium, the United Kingdom, China).

But the nation-state continues to be viewed as the highest form of political order.  As a result, there is the constant threat that multinational states will tear themselves apart, as separate nations each seek to secure statehood.  The Basques in Spain have been seeking independence for decades.  Belgium always seems on the verge of disintegration, as the Flemish and the Wallonians contest the meaning of Belgian.  The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe removed the lid from simmering demands for autonomy.  Witness the peaceful division of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993 or the violent demise of Yugoslavia into at least seven separate states (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Republic of Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, and the disputed Kosovo) in the early 1990s.

The breakup of the Soviet Union afforded many opportunities for similar demands to be placed on the new states.  South Ossetia represents one example of these tensions, intensified because of competing U.S. and Russian interests in the future of Georgia, which are at the heart of the fighting that broke out this week.