The Persian Gulf and controversial borders
Borders
are volatile (to say the least) in the already tense Persian Gulf region. With
communities presenting very different living standards and the myriad of
checkpoints the situation deteriorates on an ongoing basis. Recent events are
self-evident.
A
general approach previously used in the region (and in many others around the
world by former colonial powers imposing them to former colonies) has to do
with partition solutions. They work under the assumption that the hostilities
between opposing ethnic groups makes it impossible for them to live peacefully
together in a single state (Haklai and Loizides, ed., 2015). There are many
reasons to disagree with the partition solution. For an academic reference see
for example Laitin (2004), Sambanis (2000), Sambanis and Schulhofer-Wohl
(2009), and others.
The
EGALITARIAN SHARED SOVEREIGNTY may rule out extreme situations such as:
- Sovereignty of the disputed territories to be totally in the hands of only one of the claiming parties.
- Existing sovereignty should automatically continue, or that everything should remain in a status quo.
- The intervention of the United Nations or any other party alien to the dispute. Several problems immediately arise.
United Nations
(UN): although UN aims to grant sovereign equality amongst the States its own system reveals a contradiction: veto power in
the Security Council is only granted to certain sovereign States.
This may be
translated (in the perception of at least one of claiming parties) as an
unbalanced and unfair starting point to have negotiations, and with a
predictable result.
Not only does
the Security Council present these problems but also other UN organizations.
Even the UN General Assembly, at first glance a fair environment for sovereign
States to participate in, has been regarded as ineffective or irredeemably
biased because of the different bargaining powers of its members.
Finally, in
cases of contested sovereignty over populated territories, stateless people are
not UN members.
Other parties:
in terms of other parties alien to the dispute (for example, the United States,
the United Kingdom, Russia, China) history is self-evident in demonstrating
their policies in the region have been far from successful, have taken little
care about the local population and their needs, and have been more (only) centered
on their geostrategic domestic policies rather than taking Israel and Palestine
into consideration.
In
brief, in order to acknowledge the controversial features the EGALITARIAN
SHARED SOVEREIGNTY advises to remove the borders and any checkpoints in the
disputed territories. As we discussed when assessing population in the context
of the Israel-Palestine difference a while ago in this blog series, by applying
the EGALITARIAN SHARED SOVEREIGNTY, the inhabitants of the disputed territories
would be citizens of both bordering sovereign states, they would have a common
passport valid in the disputed territories. In terms of religion, as the second
pre-requisite recognizes basic non-political liberties, freedom of movement and
residence would be adopted at a constitutional level. The lexically prior
prerequisite of non-political liberties controls this.
Jorge Emilio Núñez
Twitter:
@London1701
13th
December 2018
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