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Abstract
This paper addresses questions concerning the territorial sovereignty of present day Ukraine in light of established concepts in political geography, international relations, and international law. A template is derived from that literature to examine the particulars of the Ukrainian state extant insofar as its origins are concerned, especially as they relate to issues of the state and territory. An argument is made for the legitimacy of Ukraine as a bona fide entrant into the international system of states and, accordingly, its rights to territorial integrity. Finally, the challenges confronting Ukraine owing to its Soviet geographical heritage and ethnographic landscape are discussed, especially in light of its neighboring regional hegemon, Russia.
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to Alexander B. Murphy and Gerard Toal for their comments on a draft of this article. Any opinions and conclusions expressed here are solely the author’s responsibility.
Notes
1. The EU Association Agreement with Ukraine, with its embedded free trade provisions, was signed finally in June 2014 by the newly elected President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, but its implementation date remains, at this writing, uncertain (Pifer Citation2014).
2. Thus, “State and society are … related with boundaries, but anything outside refers only to other states” (53). Agnew intended this discussion to be a corrective to what he viewed as an overly state-centric focus in the field of international relations, termed by him “the territorial trap.”
3. Elden (Citation2010, 811–812): “Territory can be understood as political technology: it comprises techniques for measuring land and controlling terrain. Measure and control – the technical and the legal – need to be thought alongside land and terrain.”
4. For a detailed description of the technical challenges and physical dangers involved in this process, see Robb (Citation2007).
5. Although insisting on the need for a more robust critical geopolitics to make better sense of the postmodern era, he nevertheless concludes that we must be “… careful to specify the postmodern as a distinctive moment in the geopolitical history of modernity as a whole and not as a radical rupture from it” (Citation2000, 176).
6. Paasi (Citation2009, 226) refers to this as “spatial socialization … the process through which individual actors and collectivities are socialized as members of specific territorially bounded spatial entities …”
7. Additionally, the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) merged with Germany proper, again following the ethnoterritorial rationale.
8. Ethnic Russians made up 72 percent of the new Soviet state’s Communist Party members in 1922, Ukrainians only 6 percent (Pipes Citation1968, 278).
9. Attempts by Ukrainian nationalist groups to form and sustain an independent state as World War I was ending and in its aftermath proved unavailing owing both to internal disputes and unrelenting military intervention by German and later Polish, anti-communist White, and Soviet forces (Subtelny Citation1988, 355–379).
10. The lower status ethnic units were subordinate to one of the union republics.
11. The Belarus–Ukrainian border was extended westward as both republics gained territory from Poland after the World War II.
12. Lorimer (Citation1946, 186–187) estimated that the Ukrainian SSR gained 9.2 million persons in the 1939–1940 territorial acquisitions from Poland and Romania following the implementation of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. A very large but indeterminate number of these people would subsequently perish, be deported to Soviet labor camps, or flee in the World War II and its aftermath. Snyder (Citation2010) is the best source for specifics.
13. Note that Murphy (Citation1996, 95) also referred to the “… territorial order of early modern Europe as an incubator for the rise of nationalism” (emphasis added).
14. The decision in February 1988 by the leadership of the ethnic Armenian majority in the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, which was part of the Azerbaydzhan SSR, to join their co-ethnics in the Armenian SSR was the first direct challenge to the established territorial structure of the USSR.
15. Kravchuk was elected as independent Ukraine’s first president in an election held in tandem with the referendum.
16. Article 2 of the Russo-Ukrainian Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership affirms directly that both “… parties shall respect each other’s territorial integrity, and confirm the inviolability of the borders existing between them” (for the full text, see Stewart Citation1997, 53).
17. From among the post-Soviet states, Murphy (Citation2002, 204) mentions “… Russia, the new states of the Caucasus and Central Asia …” in this category, but omits Ukraine. Given that his examples are not intended to be exhaustive, I assume that it is not inappropriate to include it here.
18. The Baltic States can refer back to their previous independence in the interwar period and their unlawful annexation into the USSR as a de jure claim to sovereignty, but they are, nevertheless, clearly and strongly ethnoterritorial in reality.