Le Norme Internazionali sull'Integrità Territoriale e la guerra dei balcani nel 1990

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Global Society, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2002

International Norms of Territorial Integrity and the Balkan Wars of the 1990s1

MIKULAS FABRY

This essay investigates the role of the post-1945 norms, rules and practices pertaining to state recognition of territorial claims in the bloodiest series of con¯ icts in post-1945 Europe, the Balkan wars of the last decade. These moral and legal normsÐ Robert Jackson and Mark Zacher evocatively call them ``the territorial covenant’’,2 and Zacher, more recently, ``the territorial integrity norm3Ð stipulate that territorial change attained through the use of military force cannot be accepted by the society of states as valid. They outlaw ``the acquiring of the right of sovereignty by victory’’, as Thomas Hobbes de® ned conquest in Leviathan,4 and permit only territorial modi® cations attained by way of consent of all parties involved. The same applies to non-sovereign jurisdictions that become sovereign: unless their governments decide otherwise, their former administrative borders must remain intact. I suggest that territorial norms had a signi® cant presence in external attitudes towards the Yugoslav wars and their possible settlements and that the actual international decisions with respect to the Balkans were by and large consistent with these norms. There are two types of territorial norms: (1) those concerning the right to statehood (territorial constitutive norms) and (2) those relating to alteration of state frontiers (territorial regulative norms). Territorial constitutive norms lay down how a state may come into being or cease to exist, what entity can be a legitimate claimant of sovereign statehood, and in what borders can a new state be recognised as sovereign. Territorial regulative norms spell out modus operandi for changing title to a particular territorial segment between already established states. In Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina both types of norms were relevant, in Kosovo only the former. 1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the ISA Annual Convention held on 20± 24 February 2001 in Chicago. For their comments on previous drafts I thank Amir Abedi, William Bain, Jordana Heaton, Kal Holsti, Robert Jackson, Alan James, Brian Job, Jean Laponce, Mark Zacher, Nives Zupanec and two anonymous reviewers. I also gratefully acknowledge support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Killam Trust and Sibyl von der Schulenburg. 2. Robert Jackson and Mark Zacher, ``The Territorial Covenant: International Society and the Stabilization of Boundaries’’, Working Paper No. 15, Institute of International Relations, Vancouve r (1997). 3. Mark Zacher, ``The Territorial Integrity Norm: International Boundaries and the Use of Force’’, International Organization, Vol. 55, No. 2 (2001), pp. 215± 250. 4. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, J.C.A. Gaskin (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 469± 470. ISSN 1360-082 6 print/ISSN 1469-798 X online/02/020145-30 Ó 2002 University of Kent at Canterbury DOI: 10.1080/0953732022013290 1


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