Could conquest return?

It’s only a century since US diplomats first persuaded the world that it’s wrong for countries to annex their neighbours

https://aeon.co/essays/how-it-became-wrong-for-nations-to-conquer-others


Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, Battle of San Juan, Cuba, 1898. Photo by William Dinwiddie/Library of Congress



We live in a world where less and less seems to be universally agreed on, but there is one important exception. Virtually all national governments, either implicitly or explicitly, agree that respect for the ‘sovereignty and territorial integrity’ of other nation-states is a fundamental principle of the international community. According to the United Nations Charter ratified in 1945, states are committed to refraining ‘from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.’ (Note that in this essay I use the term ‘state’ rather than the more ambiguous terms ‘nation’ or ‘country’. This does not refer to subordinate political units such as individual states within the United States). It is rare to find anyone who will openly support the idea that annexing territory from another state, after forcibly conquering it, could be legitimate. Conquest exists, of course, but it is almost always disguised as something else, whether it is Russia’s technique of promoting the secession of neighbouring regions, and then annexing them after holding a referendum, or Israel’s technique of calling it an occupation rather than a conquest.

Political leaders today take pride in rejecting conquest as illegitimate, which makes our current international order seem civilised and peace-loving. What could possibly justify taking by force territory that is not one’s own? But the idea that conquest is never legitimate and acceptable in international affairs is relatively new. As the 17th-century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius argued, treaties that end wars should be honoured, even if they forcibly impose unjust conditions, for example by taking away part of a state’s territory. Such treaties, even if unjust, may sometimes be the only way to end wars, and rejecting them on principle would merely make it impossible for wars to end. Moreover, as the 19th-century American jurist Henry Wheaton observed: ‘The title of almost all the nations of Europe to the territory now possessed by them … was originally derived from conquest, which has been subsequently confirmed by long possession.’ The very existence of almost any state, from this perspective, seems to depend, inevitably, on the legitimacy of conquest.

But instead of Grotius’s law of nations, which attempts to limit conquest by allowing it a regulated path to legality, we have an international order that guarantees as an absolute right the territory of each state as it currently exists. What is banned is not profiting from conquest as such, but only profiting from conquest that took place after about 1945, or even more recently in the case of conquests against colonial empires by emerging independent states. Apparently, the conquests that happened before a certain point in history are completely legitimate, but now conquest is one of the worst crimes imaginable. How did we come to have an international order that is so radically protective of the status quo?

Anything so widespread and deeply entrenched as today’s prohibition against annexation by conquest is a product of many different factors coinciding. One of the most puzzling things about it is that those who seem most capable of conquest on a large scale are some of the biggest opponents of forcible territorial expansion. It is no surprise that conquest is deplored by victims of conquest, such as Palestinians or Ukrainians, or those who could become victims of conquest, such as Estonians or Taiwanese. The interesting question is why, for example, the United States, still by far the world’s largest military force, is a major proponent of the rule against annexation by conquest. The US maintains military force on every continent in the world and uses it frequently, but not since annexing the Northern Mariana Islands, which it conquered during the Second World War, has the US annexed conquered territory. Why would the world’s only superpower tie its own hands in this way?


An LVT Comes Ashore, Saipan (1944) by William F Draper. Courtesy Wikipedia

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