How India Became Territorial

Foreign Policy, Diaspora, Geopolitics

Itty Abraham

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781503608412
  9780804791632
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780804792684
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why do countries go to war over disputed lands? Why do they fight even when the territories in question are economically and strategically worthless? Drawing on critical approaches to international relations, political geography, international law, and social history, and based on a close examination of the Indian experience during the twentieth century, Itty Abraham addresses these important questions and offers a new conceptualization of foreign policy as a state territorializing practice.

Identifying the contested process of decolonization as the root of contemporary Asian inter-state territorial conflicts, he explores the political implications of establishing a fixed territorial homeland as a necessary starting point for both international recognition and national identity—concluding that disputed lands are important because of their intimate identification with the legitimacy of the postcolonial nation-state, rather than because of their potential for economic gains or their place in historic grievances.

By treating Indian diaspora policy and geopolitical practice as exemplars of foreign policy behavior, Abraham demonstrates how their intersection offers an entirely new way of understanding India's vexed relations with Pakistan and China. This approach offers a new and productive way of thinking about foreign policy and inter-state conflicts over territory in Asia—one that is non-U.S. and non-European focused—that has a number of implications for regional security and for foreign policy practices in the contemporary postcolonial world.

1

Territory and Foreign Policy

My primary concern, to recapitulate, is to understand how the path taken to Indian decolonization had profound but poorly appreciated political consequences. As the introduction details, my understanding of the impact of external forces on postcolonial outcomes is developed in two parts, the first examining the character of India’s encounter with the world, the second focusing on the effects of that foreign encounter on its domestic political futures. This chapter and the next outline India’s encounter with the world. Taken together, the first half of this book offers a new understanding of how territorial disputes have come to raise such intense passions among elites and domestic publics, even if the land involved is economically and politically worthless, and also of why the exchange of territory between states is almost always portrayed as a net loss to state power even when the objective benefits of resolving territorial disputes include a mutual improvement in bilateral relations and greater regional peace and stability.

The extensive scholarly discussion of interstate territorial disputes begins from the very practical concern that struggles over territory are a grave danger to the maintenance of international order.¹ A higher order concern justifies extreme reactions to territorial loss because such loss brings state sovereignty into question. Both concerns are entirely sensible but beg the larger question. Few scholars stop to ask why the loss or gain of territory should raise such intense emotions and generate such serious political challenges. Fewer still stop to consider what territory entails and what these entailments mean. By not exposing the concept of territory to a more critical examination, prevailing scholarship ends up reinforcing the very relation that this chapter seeks to bring into question, namely the historical and political contingency of the link between territorial possession and modern state power. To find answers to these important questions requires untangling the meanings and significance of the relationship of territory, state, and, as I shall argue, nation.

This is no easy task, as the conjoined meanings of these concepts are now so interwoven that it seems impossible to imagine the modern state without reference to “its” territory.² What territory is to the state is not unlike the relation between history and the nation: a self-reinforcing bond that leads to the replacement of the subject with the object.³ Not only does it appear that territory has always been the basis of state power, it also seems impossible today to imagine modern political authority without reference to exclusive territorial control. No matter how ubiquitous these beliefs, such a formulation turns the larger problematic of territory and sovereignty entirely around. The question ought to be: How did relations between territory and nation-state come to be so dominated by the idea of sovereignty as exclusionary control that no other possibility seems politically viable? Territorial sovereignty, the first half of this book will argue, became a universal condition only when former colonies like India achieved independence and found they had little choice but to define themselves in territorial terms. It was only when postcolonial states accepted preexisting colonial administrative borders that territorial sovereignty became the universal norm it appears to be today.

The starting point for this chapter is the contemporary difficulty of imagining modern political life without the prior condition of territorial possession and control. It seeks, in other words, to address the mystification of the command of territory as a precondition for political life and state existence through an interrogation of the core concepts of this study: territory and foreign policy. The need to return to the obscured origins of the coproduction of territory and sovereignty is suggested by Henri Lefèbvre when he notes, “Each state claims to produce a space wherein something is accomplished—a space even, where something is brought to perfection: namely, a unified and hence homogenous society.”⁴ Bringing “something” to perfection is a claim about how the political field seamlessly joins the spatial: it requires understanding territory’s ability to give the nation-state, in Paul Allies’s words, “a physical basis which seems to render it inevitable and eternal.”⁵ “Accomplishment” for Lefèbvre means that territorial sovereignty, the unity of nation, state, and territory, should appear to have no history; it should seem to be as if this trinity has always been in place. This appearance is necessary for the state to generate the official fiction that it has always been and is the only legitimate organizer of political life within a particular place. Such a fiction both enables and requires the state to resist any threat to the stability of the nation-state-territory trinity at any cost.

In the familiar conjunction “territorial sovereignty,” the qualifier territory, if addressed at all, is usually taken to be homogenous, fixed, bounded, ahistorical, and singular. Yet the discussion that follows draws precisely the opposite conclusions. As human geographers have long argued, territory is neither stable nor fixed but inherently variable and includes much more than just land and terrain. This unstable and multisited view of territory opens the door to understanding foreign policy as the geopolitical equivalent of David Harvey’s idea of the “territorial fix.”⁶ Foreign policy, this chapter will argue, is a state response to the fluidity of territory and is best understood as a set of enactive and performative practices that seek to stabilize territorial uncertainty. States invest territory with epistemic and material stability to appear to stand as irreplaceable and inevitable conditions of modern political life; in other words, state space as accomplishment, even perfection.

To explore these issues, this chapter is divided into the following sections. The first section offers an overview of debates in IR on territorial sovereignty. It shows that dominant conceptions of territorial sovereignty are conceptually and historically inadequate, necessitating a closer examination of the concepts of territory and territoriality. Drawing on work in critical geography allows us to understand territoriality as a set of practices—technologies—that seek to control and define space and thus to appreciate how territory emerges as an uneven, hierarchical, and divided political outcome. Exploring techniques of mapping and visualizing space in colonial India drives this point home. We find the anticolonial nationalist imaginary produces a territorial vision of India as a fissured and uneven space that ranks Hindus, as rightful owners, above Muslims, seen as an “irreducible alterity.”

Foreign policy, the following section proposes, is best understood as a state territorial practice concerned primarily with stabilizing the fluidity of territory through boundary making. In general, foreign policies seek to institute ontic boundaries between home and abroad, a distinction that equally establishes the psychic difference between safe and unsafe. Although typically understood to be in operation beyond the state’s geophysical limits, this section works through what happens in the contradictory effort to engender regions of absolute “domestic” safety, namely, the production of deep internal fissures and hierarchies within the domestic community. Foreign policy boundaries enunciated across national and state spaces produce hierarchies and unevenness both within as well as across national and state territories. The chapter closes with a symptomatic account of “foreign” policy’s effort to engender separate and stable domains of security and insecurity. Through a reading of the narratives of “abducted women” during the formation of India and Pakistan in 1947, it becomes clear how the violent territorialization of women’s bodies was a necessary step to securing and restoring a masculinized sense of honor under threat of being swept away by a feminized condition of shame and violation.

Demystifying Territorial Sovereignty

Discussions of territorial sovereignty rarely expose the term territory to critical scrutiny. Sovereignty is the focus of attention, and the rise of territorial sovereignty as a global norm is the main object of analysis. Before analyzing the variable meanings of territory and their consequential political implications, this section reminds us of the lack of agreement over the origins of the so-called norm of territorial sovereignty. Political geographer John Agnew has long criticized “fields such as international relations and political geography [for operating] very much as if sovereign territorial states and the modern state system associated with them have not only been around from time immemorial [but] will continue to do so indefinitely.”⁷ Political theorist Rob Walker proposes that by not considering how a sovereign approach to land emerged historically and became the dominant and normalized meaning of territory, international relations mistakenly allocates political space a prior ontological existence.⁸ Historian James Sheehan weighs in to note, “The state is an important part of this history [of territorial sovereignty], but not its natural or inevitable culmination.”⁹ IR scholar John Ruggie forthrightly states not only that “systems of rule need not be territorial . . . [and] systems of rule need not be territorially fixed . . . [but also] the prevailing concept of territory need not entail mutual exclusion.”¹⁰ Before turning to how territory—understood as an exclusive and sovereign space—has become the sine qua non of modern state existence, the following discussion highlights the weak historical and conceptual foundations of prevailing understandings of territorial sovereignty in IR.

The views quoted in the preceding paragraph are far from typical. Much more commonplace in IR is the assumption of territorial acquisition as an unquestioned good, a belief that is held to have been dominant since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). Westphalia is proclaimed as the moment when the idea of territorial sovereignty became hegemonic, coterminous with the emergence of the modern state as the primary unit of international life.¹¹ As Mark Zacher states confidently, “In . . . [the] early years of the Westphalian order, territory was the main factor that determined the wealth and security of states, and thus the protection and acquisition of territory were prime motivations of foreign policy”; hence, it is implied, it is no surprise that states fight over territory.¹² Daniel Philpott’s account of modern sovereignty makes complementary claims regarding the arrival of the modern state and the primacy of territorial conceptions of sovereignty. He argues that the significance of Westphalia, following the earlier Treaty of Augsburg, comes from the shift of political authorities that reduced internecine wars among European Christian principalities and marked the end of the “supraterritorial government” of the Holy Roman Empire. After Westphalia, he argues, “States were virtually uninhibited in their authority over internal matters,” a reading that implies both the equation of “internal” with “territorial” and the replacement of empire by state as the preeminent international actor.¹³

Recent scholarship, however, has questioned these assertions in multiple ways.¹⁴ First of all, the treaty’s association with an understanding of sovereignty as exclusive control has been examined and rejected as a view that conflates legal jurisdiction with supreme control. In his well-known counterreading of Westphalia, Stephen Krasner argues persuasively that the treaty matters less for the onset of ideas of exclusive territorial sovereignty and more because it forced princes to accept limits to their sovereignty in the form of protections for religious minorities living within their spatial jurisdiction.¹⁵ To the extent that Westphalia was even universally accepted as a binding constraint on royal behavior, in other words, it indexes a conception of sovereignty that is far from exclusive and points, additionally, to the heterogeneity of the “people” living within a political jurisdiction. Moreover, Edward Keene argues that, well after Westphalia, sovereignty in practice often remained partial and divisible. Land in one sovereign’s realm could be the property of individuals subject to another, physically distant, sovereign.¹⁶

Second, there is little evidence that territory was the “main factor” determining state wealth at this time. Proponents of this view often quote approvingly Charles Tilly’s famous statement about the reduction of the number of states in Europe from “500 to about 25” over the course of three centuries.¹⁷ This datum makes it appear that absorption of smaller units into larger ones is best explained by the centrality of territory to prevailing conceptions of wealth and power. Tilly’s classic account, however, suffers from serious problems of both functionalism and what might be called evolutionism. Starting by seeking an explanation of why the modern state acquired its preeminence in the modern era, he looks backward to propose that this form of political organization was the most functionally equipped to survive the challenges of the period, putting, in effect, the conceptual cart before the empirical horse. Moreover, it is difficult to describe the twenty-five remaining entities in nineteenth-century Europe as “states” with any degree of accuracy. Most, including the richest—Britain, France, and the Netherlands—were hybrid political entities that combined features of the modern state with respect to governmentality with zones of indirect and illiberal rule within a global imperial organization, a political formation that Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper call “empire states.”¹⁸ Others, including the Austro-Hungarian and German systems, combined aspects of noncontiguous imperial rule with confederal systems of allegiance and domination. Finally, even if it is conceded that territory was the prime source of wealth in Western Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, it does not follow that territorial sovereignty preceded legal understandings of state existence. Sheehan reinforces this point, noting that changing legal powers shaped understandings of modern sovereignty, not vice versa: “The expansion of the legal system was not just an instrument of an expanding sovereign authority, it was the process itself.”¹⁹ Meanings of European sovereignty were still very much in flux at this time rather than fixed around territory.

Perhaps the most stinging critique of the equation of Westphalia with territorial sovereignty and the rise of the modern state comes from legal historians. Much of the IR scholarship seems unaware that one of the founding works of modern sovereignty, Jean Bodin’s On Sovereignty, “is notable for its utter lack of attention, and even mention, of territory.” Legal historian Lauren Benton goes to say, “Bodin did not omit territory as a category through some oversight. His view was consistent with an early modern construction of sovereignty as spatially elastic. Because subjects could be located anywhere, and the tie between sovereign and subject was defined as a legal relationship, legal authority was not bound territorially.” Her work demonstrates that, from the seventeenth century onward, territorial sovereignty was more often than not segmented, partial, fragmented, and divided. By conflating long-running struggles over legal jurisdictions with uniform territorial control, most studies of sovereignty explain the rise of a territorial sovereign state as functionally superior to other forms of political organization.²⁰ Not only does this view not address the ambiguous condition of rule over physically forbidding regions such as mountains, it ignores nonterritorial forms of rule that were a characteristic feature of European power in the period of overseas empires.²¹ Emerging conceptions of sovereignty, rights, legitimacy, wars, and justice not only had to grapple with states and people, they were often driven by the actions of “nonstate actors” such as trading companies, freebooters, and pirates.²² In short, what Westphalia “means” remains far from settled.

Turan Kayaoglu has recently summarized the literature on Westphalia to show that “many norms and institutions attributed to the Peace of Westphalia emerged much later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”²³ Westphalia, for him, becomes a means by wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Territory and Foreign Policy
• 2. A Brief International History of the Nation-State
• 3. Diaspora as Foreign Policy
• 4. Geopolitics as Foreign Policy
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List