Blog Question Week of Sept 8th

Is the security -- defined as the territorial integrity -- of the state the first and foremost thing that a state's leader ought to concern her- or himself with?

I believe the answer to this question is yes, territorial integrity is a leader’s first concern. Territorial integrity means that the state should not encourage any separatist movements within the country. The leader of a state has many concerns to deal with such as the economy, trade, healthcare etc… but if a country doesn’t have territorial integrity then these issues that the leader should be dealing with, cannot be dealt with. The reason being is that the leader must focus on the squashing the separatist group, with the military. Sometimes when the leader tries to squash a separatist group this creates more problems for that country, such as war.

A good example of this is the recent Georgian conflict. The members of a providence in southern Georgia, South Ossetia, considered themselves Russian and wanted to break away from Georgia. The Georgian government obviously didn’t like this, so they sent troops in to South Ossetia. After this Russia, who felt like the Georgians were attacking their people, invaded Georgia. As I mentioned earlier, the Georgian government should have been dealing with this problem long before it spiraled into this war. Since Georgia dealt militarily with the problem, they ended up having to deal with a war and not dealing with some of the areas I mentioned above. As a result of not dealing with the other problems, Georgia was devastated by the Russians and it will take many years to rebuild Georgia. So again, Georgia is in a bit of a bind; now they have to focus on rebuilding and not other important issues. So, the moral seems to be if territorial integrity is dealt with as the first concern of a leader, the situation will not escalate. Once territorial integrity is being dealt with, then other issues such as the economy and trade can be dealt with. I believe that an example that shows a better way of dealing with Territorial Integrity comes from the Basque movement in Spain. I say better because even though the group still launches bombings against certain places but has not in recent history launched a full scale war, involving large units of the Spanish military. Although the current Spanish government officially denies it, there have been rumored negotiations with the group. So, probably the negotiations were a factor in defusing the situation but in March of 2006, they declared a permanent ceasefire with Spain, “a major breakthrough that could end Europe’s last armed conflicts.”(http://articles.latimes.com/2006/mar/23/world/fg-eta23) Since, the Spanish government focused on this threat, which was a territorial integrity threat, they were able to deal with other issues as well as being able to bring about an end to a major armed conflict.