Boxing Pandora: Rethinking Borders, States and Succession in a Democratic World, by Timothy William Waters

We live at a time when discourse about a “borderless world” and the deterritorialisation of global politics has disappeared almost as quickly as it emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Recent studies of borders, secession and territorial sovereignty have treated two contrasting narratives – of opening borders (associated with globalisation) and the reconstruction of borders (associated with securitisation) – as if they were binaries, where one can replace the other, rather than as parallel discourses that operate within the same time and space.

In his appropriately named Boxing Pandora, Timothy William Waters revisits the role of “borders, states and secession” in the contemporary world. In particular, he questions the notion that fixed borders in democracies encourage stability and promote pluralism, arguing that the classical system of rigid terrritorialisation and compartmentalisation has reached its limit and that it is time to examine a new right to secession – seen as a universal right rather than just a series of case-by-case struggles for greater autonomy. The author, an international lawyer, draws on a combination of legal and philosophical arguments to claim that such a reassessment can be applied to cases as diverse and geographically distant as the UK (Scotland), Spain (Catalonia and the Basque region), Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Sudan and parts of India.

Clearly, the cases are not comparable. Much depends on the particular political contingencies. The fact that the existing borders in countries such as Iraq, Syria and Turkey have remained in situ with the defeat of Isis, with the Kurds retaining minority status within peripheral regions of the neighbouring countries, would suggest that existing realpolitik remains stronger than the struggle for secession and independence. The same can be said for the European Union, where – despite the opening of borders, along with Brexit, leading to renewed regionalist claims – the member states will not relinquish the existing system of compartments: the borders that were are the borders that are and will be in the future.

Waters’ treatment of the secession question is comprehensive. He traces the history of fixed borders, although he focuses less on the Westphalian state system than one might have expected. He discusses the role of plebiscites, along with the problematics of gaining recognition within the international structures of the EU or the United Nations. And he argues that we impose upon countries when we forcefully hold them together just as much as when we grant an automatic right to secession. His final comments concerning the clash between “realism” and “idealism” reflect contemporary realities, while reminding the reader that many of today’s countries are the result of ethnic demands for secession/independence that emerged, often out of conflict, during the past 150 years.

While Waters promotes the idea of a global “right of secession”, he also points out the potential problems, legal, political and moral, and acknowledges that many potential successions are not likely to take place any time soon. As of now, he admits, such a right would be almost as unacceptable in the democracies of Western Europe and Canada (Quebec) as it is in the dictatorships of other regions. Yet given the current state of world instability, he challenges scholars of geopolitics to look at ways in which it might be established.

David Newman is professor of geopolitics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.

Boxing Pandora: Rethinking Borders, States and Succession in a Democratic World
By Timothy William Waters
Yale University Press, 320pp, £20.00
ISBN 9780300235890
Published 11 February 2020