Cross-Frontier Contacts

Cross-frontier contacts are relevant to situations in which members of the same national, ethnic, religious, linguistic, or cultural group are separated by international boundaries. Groups like these, which are often referred to as transfrontier minorities, are a by-product of nation-state formation. Existing frontiers are a consequence of long-standing historical processes that involved the transformation of hitherto separate jurisdictions (feudal fiefdoms, city-states, bishoprics, tribal lands, etc.), first into dynastic states or empires and then into nation-states. Nation building was conducted through two distinct albeit mutually reinforcing processes of differentiation between states and consolidation within states. The end result is an international system that places a premium on the territorial integrity of existing states as necessary for order within and between states.

A practice of territorial inviolability originally arose in the context of the overseas imperial sovereignty of European powers in the non-Western world, the consequent breakup or dismantling of those empires, and the emergence of a large number of newly independent states that previously had been colonial dependencies or internationally administered mandated or trust territories. Most sovereign, ex-colonial jurisdictions do not contain unified populations that [Page 349]identify strongly with the sovereign state in whose jurisdiction they reside. On the contrary, the population is usually divided internally and often deeply along religious, cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and other lines of territorial cleavage. In the large majority of such states, there is not today nor has there previously been any unified nation in the communitarian sense of the word; there are several and often many subnational or transnational groups that do not align with existing international borders.

The international community is nevertheless determined to preserve the territorial integrity of all such preexisting and seemingly artificial territorial jurisdictions and to refuse any minority demands for territorial revision based on their asserted “right” to self-determination. That practice of refusal was adopted to preclude and prevent an otherwise expected rush of claims for secession by such groups, which numbered in the hundreds, if not thousands, across the length and breadth of the international system, and thereby to prevent or forestall international instability that was expected to occur if those claims were accommodated.

The preemptive policy of preserving state jurisdictions in their existing territorial shape was successful in the vast majority of cases. However, this impressive achievement has not come without a price, namely, dissatisfaction and frustration on the part of those many groups who are prisoners of the current territorial status quo. Groups like these have failed to achieve independent statehood (e.g., the Basques), have been cut off from their kin states (e.g., the Hungarian minority in Slovakia and Romania), or represent scattered populations that are at odds with the territorially defined character of the modern nation-state (such as Indigenous Peoples in North and South America or the Roma in Europe).